Modeling Human Actors in an Intelligent Automated Warehouse

Warehouse automation has progressed at a rapid pace over the last decade. While the tendency has been to implement fully automated solutions, most warehouses today exist as a mixture of manually operated and fully automated material handling sections. In such a hybrid warehouse, men and machines move around goods in between sections in order to retrieve, transport and stack goods according to their nature and quantity. The biggest challenge in hybrid warehouses is to optimize the alignment of manual and automatic processes in order to improve the flow of materials between storage areas and distribution centers. Integrating individuals as human actors in an automation solution is not straightforward due to unpredictable human behavior. In this paper, we will investigate how we can model the characteristics of human actors within an automation solution and how software systems can unify human actors with automated business processes to coordinate both as first class entities for logistics activities within a hybrid warehouse.