The warehouses of the future will come in a variety of forms, but with a few common ingredients. Firstly, human operational handling of items in warehouses is increasingly being replaced by automated item handling. Extended warehouse automation counteracts the scarcity of human operators and supports the quality of picking processes. Secondly, the development of models to simulate and analyse warehouse designs and their components facilitates the challenging task of developing warehouses that take into account each customer’s individual requirements and logistic processes. Automation in Warehouse Development addresses both types of automation from the innovative perspective of applied science. In particular, it describes the outcomes of the Falcon project, a joint endeavour by a consortium of industrial and academic partners. The results include a model-based approach to automate warehouse control design, analysis models for warehouse design, concepts for robotic item handling and computer vision, and autonomous transport in warehouses. Automation in Warehouse Development is targeted at both academic researchers and industrial practitioners. It provides state-of-the art research on warehouse automation and model-based warehouse design. These topics have been addressed from a systems engineering perspective by researchers from different disciplines including software, control, and mechanical engineering, with a clear focus on the industrial applications of their research.

This book helps readers evaluate and specificy the best Warehouse Management System (WMS) for their need. The advice is based on practical knowledge, describing in detail fundamental processes and technologies needed for a basic understanding. New approaches in the structure and design of WMS are presented, along with discussion of the limitations of current systems. The book shows how to operate a simple WMS based on the open-source initiative myWMS.

This book is a compilation of advanced research and applications on robotic item picking and warehouse automation for e-commerce applications. The works in this book are based on results that came out of the Amazon Robotics Challenge from 2015-2017, which focused on fully automated item picking in a warehouse setting, a topic that has been assumed too complicated to solve or has been reduced to a more tractable form of bin picking or single-item table top picking. The book’s contributions reveal some of the top solutions presented from the 50 participant teams. Each solution works to address the time-constraint, accuracy, complexity, and other difficulties that come with warehouse item picking. The book covers topics such as grasping and gripper design, vision and other forms of sensing, actuation and robot design, motion planning, optimization, machine learning and artificial intelligence, software engineering, and system integration, among others. Through this book, the authors describe how robot systems are built from the ground up to do a specific task, in this case, item picking in a warehouse setting. The compiled works come from the best robotics research institutions and companies globally.

The definitive guide to actually building your data warehouse... Utilizing recent technology, small companies can finally build a data warehouse at a very affordable cost, and keep the design (and the data!) in-house. Large companies can now build and maintain their data warehouses better than ever before: faster, cheaper, more secure, and more agile. In fact, in this hands-on guide we will show the step-by-step development of an actual data warehouse prototype, using free-trial tools. This is a practical hands-on guide, and we will stick to the relevant topics that are important to someone who actually wants to build a DW as soon as possible. We won't be pontificating on academic positions, nor fluffing up the word count. We assume that you are more anxious to roll up your sleeves and get started than to debate theory with purists. Yet at the same time, we will detail the necessary planning that you must conduct in order to maximize the success of your data warehouse program. Along the way, we will identify and avoid the common pitfalls that can lead to failure. By following this step-by-step guide, you can create a data warehouse for your company or organization. You will not need a large budget. You will not need expensive outside consultants. You will not need to share your data outside your company. You will not need specialized skills beyond those of a typical database programmer or database administrator. Yes, you can build a data warehouse: on a small budget, completely in-house, using only your current database employee(s). Martin Gandalson will show you how, step by step. This toolkit can be used to build any data warehouse, data mart, or webhouse.

Through expanded intelligence, the use of robotics has fundamentally transformed the business industry. Providing successful techniques in robotic design allows for increased autonomous mobility, which leads to a greater productivity and production level. Rapid Automation: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications provides innovative insights into the state-of-the-art technologies in the design and development of robotics and their real-world applications in business processes. Highlighting a range of topics such as workflow automation tools, human-computer interaction, and swarm robotics, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for computer engineers, business managers, robotic developers, business and IT professionals, academicians, and researchers.

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use

The 2014 International Conference on Economics and Management Engineering (ICEME2014) is held in Hangzhou, China from October 18–19, 2014. The conference aims to provide an excellent international academic forum for all the researchers, practitioner, students and teachers in related fields to share their knowledge and results in theory, methodology and application on economics, management science and management engineering. ICEME2014 features unique mixed topics of Economics, Management Science, Management Engineering and other related ones. ICEME2014 proceeding tends to collect the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and worldwide state-of-art knowledge on economics, management science and management engineering. All the accepted papers have been submitted to strict peer-review by 2–4 expert referees, and selected based on originality, significance and clarity for the purpose of the conference. The conference program is extremely rich, profound and featuring high-impact presentations of selected papers and additional late-breaking contributions. We sincerely hope that the conference would not only show the participants a broad overview of the latest research results on related fields, but also provide them with a significant platform for academic connection and exchange.