Energy-Aware Models for Warehousing Operations

Overview & Synopsis

There is a growing need in industries worldwide to become more sustainable and energy efficient. Due to rapid increase in demand of goods, there has been a rise in demand of logistics and operational services. This necessitates needs for a large number of warehouses and distribution centers to satisfy demand. It is imperative that warehouses follow the same sustainable development model practiced in other industries. This paper extends energy efficiency techniques suggested for manufacturing to warehousing. Specifically, warehouses are modeled as M/M/c queues where forklifts are servers and this model is used to evaluate performance of energy control policies. The model is then extended to general distribution queues. Experiments based on real-world data yield results that indicate that for system utilization values between 40% and 100%, as the number of servers in the system increases by a factor of 4, energy consumption increases by a factor of 3.78.