Warehousing, the dynamic aspect of storage, is largely an automated process, designed to facilitate stock rotation by means of a combination of equipment such as stacker cranes built into the storage area, remote-controlled forklift trucks for vertical and horizontal movement of goods, and gravity flow racks, in which pallets are automatically replaced in a line.
They had continual access to food and water while being housed in laminar flow racks under specific pathogen-free conditions.
This model is useful for the performance evaluation and design of the flow-rack AS/RS.
In the present paper, a particular type of Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (AS/RS), known as flow-rack AS/RS, is studied.
The flow-rack AS/RS consists of a multi-deep rack, and two machines; the first one is used for storage operations and the second one for retrieval operations.
This analytical model, which depends on the variety of items stored in the system and on their proportions, certainly represents a functional relation between the physical parameters (length, width and depth) of the flow-rack AS/RS.
To reduce the installation cost and to increase the performances of the AS/RSs, a new variant of flow-rack AS/RS has been developed, which consists of a free-fall-flow-rack AS/RS (FF-flow-rack AS/RS).
In this section, we present a new type of flow-rack AS/RS, which consists of FF-flow-rack AS/RS.
We shall refer to the new type of AS/RS, the free-fall-flow-rack AS/RS, or FF-flow-rack AS/RS.
Compared with the classic flow-rack AS/RS presented by Sari et al. (2005), the free-fall flow-rack AS/RS offers many advantages.
