Performance Guidelines

To be able to prepare the bins in time to avoid waiting in ports, the WMS should provide task groups for at
least the next 30 minutes of operation. AutoStore needs tasks in advance in order to prepare and plan the bin
delivery in time. AutoStore also need a certain queue of work to have sufficient flexibility to keep robots and
ports busy. Similarly, tasks should be created at least 30 minutes before they are needed in port. Urgent tasks
are possible, but may impact the planned jobs. Also, as described earlier, the queue of tasks must be
balanced wrt. categories. Hence, the 30 minute rules also applies for each category.

To optimize performance, it is recommended to minimize the restrictions. Restrictions such as item grouping,
sequence requirements, shipment grouping and category requirements reduces the flexibility. These features
should only be used when they are required by the warehouse processes.

Behavior when few available Tasks or Bins

AutoStore is optimized for a high throughput environment that has sufficient work for the open ports.

In situations where there are very few task groups in the system, or very few bins that corresponds with the
requested content codes, AutoStore may assign the work to one of the ports, instead of balancing them on
multiple open ports. In these situations some ports are not receiving bins, because the few bins or task groups
are already internally assigned to another port.

This behavior can typically be observed during simple tests with the WMS SDK.