720792Choreo - A new paradigm in warehouse management systems for ecommerce fulfilmentClosedGRD Development of PrototypeInnovate UKDemanding e-Commerce fulfilment requires increasingly intelligent Warehouse Management Systems (WMS). Some vendors have introduced highly automated ‘goods-to-man’ stock movement solutions but these are capital intensive and capacity-constrained. Other vendors, including Synergy, offer more flexible ‘man-to-goods’ (MTG) methods with intelligent picking trolleys that are pushed to the stock locations. Although relatively inexpensive compared with automation, MTG solutions are demanding for pickers and staffing costs can rise dramatically at peak periods. A new approach to this problem is to retain high flexibility but minimise human effort without requiring expensive automated plant and equipment, the key being to coordinate movement of people and unpicked stock within the warehouse. A real time location system is proposed that will update precise 3D locations of the people and stock. New real-time routing and scheduling algorithms will identify the optimum routes for stock and people movement around the warehouse and schedule change along those routes, in real-time, to compensate for planned and unplanned events, e.g. delays within the Warehouse; new stock arrivals; new stock collection requests; predicted changes in stock collection patterns in response to expected changes in received stock requests. A key element of the proposed new system is dynamic relocation of unpicked stock within the warehouse to minimise the distance travelled for picking. This innovative WMS approach will: a) Significantly reduce the time taken to pick stock, enabling processing of more orders per day whilst optimising labour utilisation; b) Allow installation in any warehouse using any standard order/stock picking trollies and totes; c) Provide robotic levels of efficiency at a much reduced cost level. This 18-month project will deliver detailed evaluations of the functionality and performance capabilities based around three increasingly complete prototype demonstrators.