Method for designing a hybrid rack picking system

The order-picking of cases shows a high potential for automation. In addition to the commonly used portal robots systems are required which could flexibly deal with a large assortment of articles. A new concept combines classical automated storage/retrieval systems (AS/RS) with modern handling technologies. In addition to a description of the system this paper presents suitable fields of application. The system offers two different options for the picking of a certain article - manual picking from pallet at the end-of-aisle as well as automated single pick. In order to find the most effective variant for overall system performance, a model is developed to determine the optimal number of single picks.