دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی استفاده از اینترنت اشیا مبتنی بر سیستم مدیریت انبار برای لجستیک هوشمند - تیلور و فرانسیس 2017

Warehouse operations need to change due to the increasing complexity and variety of customer orders. The demand for real-time data and contextual information is requried because of the highly customised orders, which tend to be of small batch size but with high variety. Since the orders frequently change according to customer requirements, the synchronisation of purchase orders to support production to ensure on-time order fulfilment is of high importance. However, the inefficient and inaccurate order picking process has adverse effects on the order fulfilment. The objective of this paper is to propose an Internet of things (IoT)-based warehouse management system with an advanced data analytical approach using computational intelligence techniques to enable smart logistics for Industry 4.0. Based on the data collected from a case company, the proposed IoT-based WMS shows that the warehouse productivity, picking accuracy and efficiency can be improved and it is robust to order variability.

5. Conclusions

The operations of a warehouse are required to change accordingly, due to the complex and high variety of customer orders as well as the demand for real-time information. Therefore, the traditional manual warehouse operation is no longer suitable for manufacturers in the era of Industry 4.0. Thus, an innovative WMS is very important to improve the efficiency and allow customised order fulfilment.

In this paper, the proposed WMS is integrated with the fuzzy logic technique to select the most suitable order picking method, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the order picking process. Through the case study results in this research, it was implied that the WMS could help to provide a better warehouse operation performance regarding both tangible and intangible benefits. For the tangible benefits, it can improve order fulfilment such as order fill rate and order accuracy. Moreover, it can enhance the time of receiving, the inventory accuracy and the warehouse productivity in order picking. For the intangible benefits, it can enhance the packing method, and the inventory can be traceable with RFID. In addition, the morale of the staff can be improved. As this study mainly focuses on practical applications and the order picking operation, the routing and storage policies have not been discussed in detail. However, the space allocation and the reduction of travel distance are very important in enhancing the warehouse performance. Therefore, future work in the fuzzy logic application for batch the zone, sequential zone and wave picking approaches can be further studied. Incorporating artificial intelligence will be one of the future direction to enable smart logistics and information can be further automated so as to streamline the warehouse operation with higher efficiency, performance and less costly in long term and further research on smart robotics should be conducted as it changes the warehouse pick and pack operations from picker-to-goods to goods-to-picker using robots. In general, the adoption of IoT and robotics is the main future research direction to further improve warehouse efficiency