Study of Warehouse Management System (WMS) by using Automated Storage/Retrieval System (ASRS)

The complexity and diversity of goods in today's retail industry including within the retail warehouses of SMEs make warehouses storage and retrieval problematic. Warehouse labor works without a warehouse management system, manually preparing orders which is slow and has an unacceptable result. Automated Storage/Retrieval System (ASRS) are generally available but often designed for large industrial systems. There are different limitations and uses. In terms of software, characteristics of product containers for storage and some retail industry still need to work with labors to count the products. In this project the warehouse management system using ASRS is studied for retail warehouse of SMEs to increase the efficiency of storage and retrieval of goods in warehouses. The system consists of a 2-axis robot with an adjusted gripper, a workspace for workers with a Karakuri conveyor, software that controls the robot to pick up the items according to the purchase order and helps worker count and input the amount of retrieved goods from warehouses. The prototype of the system is designed, built, and tested. It shows that with a test of 25 orders, the system can constantly organize the orders without mistakes. The robot moves with an average speed about 47s per order. Testing the process collaborating with humans, it shows that it takes 12 min and 41 sec to complete 10 orders without mistakes. According to the test results, the prototype of the warehouse management system using ASRS can pick up containers of various sizes, and software that will help reducing mistakes which may improve the storage and retrieval in warehouse in terms of speed and accuracy.