A Physical Emulation Model of Cellular Warehousing for E-commerce Logistics

With the development of E-commerce logistics industry, higher requirements towards logistics and warehousing emerge, including the shorter delivery time and higher operation accuracy when processing massive SKUs and orders. However, the existing full-automated solutions cannot meet the variety and variation of E-commerce warehousing demands. Inspired by cellular manufacturing, a flexible and reconfigurable warehousing system called cellular warehousing is put forward. Although several articles have illustrated this new concept, few systematic studies on cell formation, scenario design and physical emulation model exist. This study develops this conceptual model with three-fold objectives. First, the cell formation and operation flow of cellular warehousing are deciphered. Second, application scenarios are given including intra-cell and inter-cell operation, with the background of different types of order processing. At last, a physical emulation model is created as test-bed for further qualitative evaluation and insight abstraction.