Online Dispatching Rules For Vehicle-Based Internal Transport Systems

On-line vehicles dispatching rules are widely used in many facilities such as warehouses to control vehicles' movements. Single-attribute dispatching rules, which dispatch vehicles based on only one parameter, are used commonly. However, multi-attribute dispatching rules prove to be better in general. In this study, we introduce new dispatching rules and evaluate their performance compared to several good dispatching rules in literature, using the experimental design of a real case study. The performance criteria are minimizing the average load waiting time while keeping the maximum load waiting time as small as possible and better utilize vehicles. The experiments show that newly introduced hybrid dispatching rule yields the best performance overall.