Linear Time Ordering of Bins using a Conveyor System

Abstract

A local food wholesaler company is using an automated commissioning system, which brings the bins containing the appropriate product to the commissioning counter, where the worker picks the needed amounts to 12 bins corresponding to the same number of orders. To minimize the number of bins to pick from, they pick for several different spreading tours, so the order of bins containing the picked products coming from the commissioning counter can be considered random in this sense. Recently, the number of bins containing the picked orders increased over the available storage space, and it was necessary to find a new way of storing and ordering the bins to spreading tours. We developed a conveyor system which (after a preprocessing step) can order the bins in linear space and time.