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Towards the Full Automation of Distribution Centers
In this paper it is rst identied the trade-off
among costs, exibility and performances of autonomous robotic
solutions for material handling processes, where adding value
with automation is not as trivial as in production processes:
hence the requirement for automated solutions to be simple, lean
and ecient becomes even stricter. Then a method for modelling
and comparing differential performances and costs of manual
and autonomous solutions is developed. As a result of the
method, a smart man-machine collaborative interface is designed
and its impact evaluated on a specic case of study. Results are
then generalized and prove the strong conclusions that in
unconstrained environments, where full standardization cannot
be achieved, the risk of investing in autonomous solutions can
only be mitigated by creating a fast and smart man-machine
collaborative interface.
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