An auction-based approach to control automated warehouses using smart vehicles

In modern automated warehouses smart vehicles are becoming popular, allowing flexible adaptation to changing requirements. Thus, encouraged by their considerable abilities, this paper proposes an auction-based approach for the control of automated warehouse systems with smart vehicles to provide modularity, near- realtime capabilities, scalability, robustness and services orientation to the whole system. In particular, the approach focuses on the mission assignment problem. Moreover, to overcome the difficulties in design and development of the employed approach and to size and configure the system to be controlled, a hybrid model with an automatic model synthesis procedure to dynamically add/remove resources is presented.