Item storage reassignment problem in robotic mobile fulfillment systems under customer order characteristic fluctuations

This article studies the item storage reassignment problem (ISRP) in the robotic mobile fulfilment system (RMFS). As the demand pattern evolves, the item storage assignment should be adapted accordingly to avoid potential workload. Hence, the item storage reassignment becomes an indispensable process of warehouse operations. This paper proposes an Interchange-Guided Sequencing Algorithm (IGSA) that identifies the interchange dependencies between item groups and constructs the corresponding group interchange sequence. Computational experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and further analyse when reassignment should be performed under different item varieties and warehouse capacities.