The Research Of Automated Warehouse Order Scheduling Based On Imperialist Competitive Algorithm

With the rapid progress of science and technology and development of E-commerce inrecent years, the huge market competition has bought a new market pattern that modernenterprises are under great pressures of competition from inside and outside. As the maincomponent of enterprise consumer services, commodity-inter-flow service becomes the key toenhancing enterprise competitiveness. Automated stereoscopic warehouse is an important partof logistics system and its scheduling quality directly affects the entire enterprise logisticsservice quality. Based on the actual situation of enterprise storage system, the research of theautomatic stereoscopic warehouse order scheduling is of importance to theoreticalsignificance and practical value in warehousing system.According the automated multi-layer warehouse’s layout and facilities as well as theorder features, this essay designs a weight allocation rule based on order quantity, deliverytime and customer importance degree to sort the orders in scheduling decision points. Twodifferent scheduling flows of ex-orders prior scheduling and compound orders schedulinghave been built and are solved by Imperialist Competitive Algorithm(ICA). By comparingand analyzing the simulation results, we provide reasonable advice for orders scheduling. Themain contents in this paper are as follows:(1) Firstly outline the research background and research status of automatedmulti-layer warehouse orders scheduling and solving algorithm for this problem, thedeficiencies of the research at present are discussed and produce the research’s objective andcontents.(2) After analyzing the warehouse scheduling flow, this paper find out orderscheduling decision point and scheduling priority rule. Weight allocation rule based on orderquantity, delivery time and customer importance degree has been built and Ex-orders priorscheduling flow and compound orders scheduling flow are produced accordingly.(3) By studying the principle and detailed process of traditional ImperialistCompetitive Algorithm, this essay constructs a discrete ICA by applying the method ofmutation and crossover in its assimilation process and introduces “Hamming Distance” toexamine the assimilation effect. Refer to the experience of other studies and throughsimulation, the optimum parameters for Imperialist Competitive Algorithm have beenconfirmed to solve order scheduling problem.(4) Ex-orders prior scheduling flow and compound orders scheduling flow havebeen solved by ICA and GA method separately. Result shows that: comparing to the Ex-ordersprior scheduling flow and compound orders scheduling flow, compound orders schedulingflow can decrease the order execution time and ex-orders tardiness on the whole and increasethe warehouse facilities utilization rate. Comparing the solution quality and convergence ofICA and GA, result shows that ICA has a better solution quality than GA no matter in solvingEx-orders prior scheduling flow or compound orders scheduling flow, it shows a good solvingability in complex scheduling problems. While ICA has a slower rate of convergence thanGA.