Networked Warehouse Management Systems 2: packing with complex shapes – Net-WMS-2

This project builds on the former European FP6 Net-WMS Strep project that has shown that constraint-based optimisation techniques can considerably improve industrial practice for box packing problems, while identifying hard instances that cannot be solved optimally, especially in industrial 3D packing problems with rotations, the needs for dealing with more complex shapes (e.g. wheels, silencers) involving continuous values.

Based on these contributions, we will develop innovative prototype tools for supply chain decision making, including:

a generic pallet/container loading optimiser
a prototype solving a real-world industrial pallet loading problem
a packing designer for complex shapes
a prototype solving a real-world packing problem with complex shapes

In this way, we hope, on the one hand, to make fundamental contributions in the emerging field of hybrid continuous-discrete geometrical constraint programming, and on the other hand, to apply these novel optimisation techniques to real-life packing problems in the industry, with a flexible supply chain model capable of handling personalised orders in a cost-effective and eco-efficient manner.

Software Ibex version 2 www.emn.fr/z-info/ibex

Software Casper version 1 contraintes.inria.fr/casper

Existing Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) provide advanced features to manage the movement of items within the warehouse, but fail to comply with the increasing demand on more numerical handling, in particular for achieving a flexible supply chain model capable of handling personalised orders in a cost-effective and eco-efficient manner. Generally, WMS are lacking optimisation functionalities and advanced packing tools for determining how to pack items on a pallet, how many cartons are needed to pack customer items, how to pack pallets in a truck according to stability constraints and customers to visit, or at a larger scale, how to redesign a storage area, an assembly line, etc.

The vision of the Net-WMS-2 project is that these hard combinatorial optimisation functionalities can be addressed in a new generation of WMS with advanced software technologies combining rule-based knowledge representation and constraint programming optimisation.

This project builds on the former European FP6 Net-WMS Strep project that has shown that constraint-based optimisation techniques can considerably improve industrial practice for box packing problems, while identifying
hard instances that cannot be solved optimally, especially in industrial 3D packing problems with rotations,
the needs for dealing with more complex shapes (e.g. wheels, silencers) involving continuous values.

The aim of the Net-WMS-2 follow-up project is to solve these remaining problems by focusing on them with a restricted consortium composed of the three key partners on these particular topics. To this end, we expect to advance the state-of-art in
- constraint solving for hybrid discrete-continuous geometrical constraints,
- constraint propagation with polymorphic shapes,
- search strategies for packing problems with discrete rotations,
- knowledge representation with rule-based modelling languages,
- integration of design and optimisation technologies in WMS.

Based on these contributions, we will develop innovative prototype tools for supply chain decision making, including:
- a generic pallet/container loading optimiser
- a prototype solving a real-world industrial pallet loading problem
- a packing designer for complex shapes
- a prototype solving a real-world packing problem with complex shapes

The academic partners will make most of the technology available to the scientific and technological communities through their integration in the open-source software they develop, respectively in the CHOCO/IBEX constraint programming system developed by EMN, and in the Rules2CP modelling language developed by INRIA. The SME KLS OPTIM will integrate these developments in the existing KLS optimisation suite which is itself largely based on Net-WMS technology.

In this way, we hope, on the one hand, to make fundamental contributions in the emerging field of hybrid continuous-discrete geometrical constraint programming, and on the other hand, to apply these novel optimisation techniques to real-life packing problems in the industry, with a flexible supply chain model capable of handling personalised orders in a cost-effective and eco-efficient manner.