Spatio-Temporal Data Model And Its Applications For Stereoscopic Warehouse

The logistics industry is an important part of the national economy. As the artery of national economic development and the basic industries, its development has become the measure of a country's modernization level and an important indicator of comprehensive national strength. Operational efficiency and cost of storage system directly affected the efficiency and cost of logistics due to its important roles in logistics chain. With the social and economic development, the problem that the storage service-quality and storage efficiency can't meet the increasing needs of logistics for society becomes more and more prominent. How to reduce the storage cost and improve storage efficiency are the open topics and should be pay more attentions.Warehouse operations are typical spatio-temporal process, which are dependent on geographical space and time greatly. Stereoscopic warehouse is a high-efficiency and high-capacity storage system, which is dependent on the time and space, is composed of high level rack, complete handling equipment and computing technology. With the rapid development of economic, the operational events of inbounding, shelving, outbounding, picking and stock transferring for goods happen frequently in warehouse and leading to spatio-temporal changes to goods. At the same time, the stereoscopic warehouse are vary with business changes leads to the changes in the layout of the warehouse, split and merger of shelf and slotting, the real-time monitoring and management of vehicles and business processes, which increases the difficulty for warehouse management. With the expansion of stereoscopic warehouse scale and increase of stereoscopic warehouse management requirements, the operations of stereoscopic warehouse needs a large amount of spatio-temporal information, such as the slot sharing, changing, utilization analysis, spatial and temporal distribution of goods, goods out of storage traffic analysis, real-time stocktaking of goods, real-time monitoring of vehicles, and so on. The existed MIS systems have difficult to meet new needs of stereoscopic warehouse. In order to allocating storage resources rationally, reducing storage costs and controlling the warehouse business process, it is necessary to analyze and model the objects of stereoscopic warehouse and their relations. So it is a meaningful thing to research the spatio-temporal data model for stereoscopic warehouse.Therefore, by setting the stereoscopic warehouse and its business process as the subjects of the study, this paper conducts a thorough research on data acquisition, analysis, modeling and optimization of business processes, with the help of system science and the objected-oriented spatio-temporal modeling technology. The main research contents and achievements are as follows.(1) The elements and the basic processes of stereoscopic warehouse are described, and the expression, access methods and spatio-temporal characteristics of stereoscopic warehouse data objects are also elaborated. From the perspective of the business process and spatial-temporal characteristics, the data is classified and the classification system is established based on stereoscopic warehouse knowledge.(2) Considering the problem of real-time acquisition and visualization of stereoscopic warehouse data, the data acquisition methods based on barcode, GPS/GPRS and Zigbee are investigated, the real-time acquisition and display of stereoscopic warehouse business data are implemented, and it will be useful for applications of the spatio-temporal data model for stereoscopic warehouse.(3) According to data object characteristics of stereoscopic warehouse, the method which combines the event-described and object-oriented technology is used for stereoscopic warehouse data modeling. The elements of the warehouse and its relationship are analyzed, and an object-oriented spatial-temporal data model for stereoscopic warehouse is constructed.(4) A modeling method for complex behavior of objects based on sequence of events is proposed by analysis the events of stereoscopic warehouse. The events, events links and events sequence are expressed by formal language, and a formal description template and specific description methods for complex behavior of objects are presented. The events are extracted and coded, and the spatio-temporal data organization and storage method is put forward.(5) An application framework for spatio-temporal data model is proposed. Based on goods-picking, the warehouse picking system and operational objectives are analyzed in detail. Taking the spatial-temporal characteristics of the goods into account,, a dynamic scheduling scheme for stereoscopic warehouse picking is proposed, and the dynamic scheduling optimization model is constructed and validated.(6) According to object-oriented software development method, a stereoscopic warehouse management information system based on spatial-temporal data model is developed, which describes the system development environment, the overall system architecture, database and the various functions, and implements the above functions at last. Through the system's practical application in the enterprise, not only the correctness of the spatial-temporal data model is verified, but also the solutions for warehouse management and enterprise decision are given.The major contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) The classification system of stereoscopic warehouse data based on stereoscopic warehouse knowledge is constructed. The spatio-temporal characteristics of stereoscopic warehouse elements are analyzed and expressed, and it is The foundation to construct stereoscopic warehouse spatial-temporal data model.(2) Considering the spatio-temporal characteristics of stereoscopic warehouse, the event-driven and object-oriented stereoscopic warehouse spatial-temporal data model is constructed, in which mainly resolved data expression of various objects in stereoscopic warehouse and the description of their complex time and spatial relationships. In order to resolve the problems in dynamic behavior of stereoscopic warehouse objects using static model, a modeling method for complex behaviors of stereoscopic warehouse objects based on event-sequence is proposed. By the driving of events, the time, spatial and attribute operations of those objects and among those objects are implemented, and the data is updated.(3) An application framework of spatio-temporal model is proposed. a dynamic scheduling scheme is presented, and it has taken the spatio-temporal characteristics of the goods for stereoscopic warehouse picking and the a dynamic scheduling optimization model into account; at last, the dynamic scheduling for picking operations is implemented.