The design of an RFID-enhanced autonomous storage planning system for 3PL warehouses

The problems that are associated with storage planning in Third-Party Logistics (3PL) warehouses are especially dynamic and complex, yet storage policy on space utilisation goes comparatively unnoticed in warehouse management. From reviewing the literature and from a deep understanding of the industry, it is understood by the authors that are proper use of space allocation strategies and storage assignment policies can ensure the maximum utilisation of space resources. Storage and retrieval in the warehouse can also be improved and made more efficient. Therefore, this paper proposes a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-enhanced Autonomous Storage Planning System (RFID-ASPS) for 3PL warehouses to cope with the changing patterns of customer demand and with product variety. The system integrates RFID technology and a decision support system to provide optimal solutions to a variety of storage problems. The system is preliminarily demonstrated through an experimental study in a simulated warehouse environment. The results reveal that the integration of RFID technology with a rule-based decision support system has the advantage of providing reliable suggestions for storage planning problems in a shorter time and making better use of limited space than was achieved by using previous methods.