Performance Evaluation of Warehouses with Automated Storage and Retrieval Technologies

In this thesis, we study the performance evaluation of two automated warehouse ma-terial handling (MH) technologies- automated storage/retrieval system (AS/RS) and autonomous vehicle storage/retrieval system (AVS/RS). AS/RS is a traditional au-tomated warehouse MH technology and has been used for more than five decades. AVS/RS is a relatively new automated warehouse MH technology and an alternative to AS/RS. There are two possible configurations of AVS/RS: AVS/RS with tier-captive vehicles and AVS/RS with tier-to-tier vehicles. We model the AS/RS and both configurations of the AVS/RS as queueing networks. We analyze and develop approximate algorithms for these network models and use them to estimate perfor-mance of the two automated warehouse MH technologies. Chapter 2 contains two parts. The first part is a brief review of existing papers about AS/RS and AVS/RS. The second part is a methodological review of queueing network theory, which serves as a building block for our study. In Chapter 3, we model AS/RSs and AVS/RSs with tier-captive vehicles as open queueing networks (OQNs). We show how to analyze OQNs and estimate relate