Smart Warehouse Management System

Abstract

AbstractA warehouse is the place where the food grains received from producers are stored before they are shipped to its respective fair price shops (FPS). Public distribution system (PDS) is a government-sponsored chain of shops entrusted with the work of distributing basic food and non-food commodities to the needy sections of the society at very cheap prices. Whenever there is a need or demand for food grains, the grains are transported from the warehouse to the FPS for public distribution purposes. Current PDS has limitations such as wastage of grains, fake beneficiaries, bogus cards, inferior quality food grains, corruption, non-transparency, non-accountability, inaccurate quantity of goods, long waiting time, low processing speed and material theft. In this context, wastage of grains indicates the loss of grains from the warehouse to the FPS. The distribution of inferior quality of food grains causes serious health issues for consumers which can be fatal. If the above-mentioned problems are addressed, more consumers can be served with better quality food. Currently, there is a need for manual intervention to maintain stocks of grain sacks and to check their vulnerability at warehouse. However, this can further be extended to improve the transparency in quality and transportation of food grains. Hence, this paper proposes SmartWMS which includes sensors with microcontroller at the warehouse to detect the moisture content in the grain sacks. Based on the moisture content, the sacks are grouped into sacks with moisture below threshold (MBT sacks) and sacks with moisture above threshold (MAT sacks). An Android application is developed to automate the transportation of MAT sacks to the FPS.KeywordsPublic distribution systemFair price shopsSmart warehouse management systemFood Corporation of IndiaAndroid application