Abstract
Energy costs account for a significant proportion of total costs in production systems. Since energy is becoming an increasingly expensive resource, therefore, it is critical to consume it as efficiently as possible. Focusing on energy efficiency is also important in terms of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the effects of other pollutants on the environment. One of the possible ways for businesses to reduce energy consumption is to use available transportation means as efficiently as possible. In the operational phase, this can be achieved by reducing unnecessary transport, selecting the most efficient delivery routes, and by optimized assignment of available vehicles to transportation orders. We present in this article a novel dynamic assignment of transportation orders to fleet with energy minimization criterion in internal transport system of a printing company. The novelty of the proposed model is that, in contrast to most existing models, it can handle a heterogeneous fleet of human-operated and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). The minimization of the energy consumption by transportation vehicles was modeled with reference to VDI 2198 standard. The need for such a model is justified by the fact that it better reflects a real production environment in many companies. The proposed optimization model was tested in simulation experiments imitating real production conditions in a large web printing house. The obtained results show that the proposed model allows for a significant reduction of energy consumption in internal transportation. The proposed model is general enough to be used in various companies with a heterogeneous fleet of internal transportation vehicles. In addition, the energy consumption factor VDI for AMRs has been determined, which can be useful in solving various problems related to energy optimization of internal transportation.
Highlights
To meet the energy saving challenges in current logistic processes, we propose in this paper a novel dynamic optimization model which aims to minimize the energy consumption in the internal transportation system of a production plant
The proposed here approach differs from approaches to the optimization of internal transportation described in the literature in that it is focused on minimization of energy consumption and it considers a heterogeneous fleet of transportation vehicles including modern, energy-efficient autonomous mobile robots (AMR) and traditional human-operated electric forklifts
Since energy consumption issues are of our primary concern, we present in Section 2 an overview of the literature on energy consumption in internal transportation systems, and we discuss the literature on routing and scheduling of transportation vehicles
Summary
The proposed here approach differs from approaches to the optimization of internal transportation described in the literature (see Section 2) in that it is focused on minimization of energy consumption and it considers a heterogeneous fleet of transportation vehicles including modern, energy-efficient autonomous mobile robots (AMR) and traditional human-operated electric forklifts. The company uses a heterogeneous fleet of transportation vehicles covering human-operated forklifts and a few quite recently purchased AMRs. The results of the simulation study and tests performed in conditions close to real production processes (characterized by a large variety of products and fluctuating ordering pattern) indicate great efficiency of the proposed model in reducing the total energy consumption by the internal transportation processes. We present a brief overview of the available related literature
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