Automated Guided Vehicle Dispatch for Predictive Shopping Navigation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing shopping systems face challenges with trolley or basket capacity limitations, leading to inconvenience and inefficiency, as customers often overload or underload their carts, and struggle to navigate to specific product areas due to memory-based shopping habits, resulting in increased shopping time and reduced comfort, especially for those with tight schedules.
Innovation Solution
An automated guided vehicle control system that includes a commodity database, historical shopping information acquisition module, purchase-item prediction module, automated guided vehicle dispatch demand assessment module, and navigation module, which predicts customer purchasing habits and dispatches suitable vehicles to waiting areas, providing navigation paths to product locations based on historical data.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If traditional trolleys or baskets are provided for customers, then customers can carry shopping items, but the limited capacity causes inconvenience when customers overload or underload their carts
Solution Approach 1:
The system dynamically assigns automated guided vehicles of different capacities based on real-time analysis of customer shopping history and predicted purchase volume. Instead of static trolley sizes, the vehicle capacity is adaptively matched to each customer's needs, resolving the contradiction between capacity adaptability and shopping convenience.
Solution Approach 2:
The system changes the parameter of vehicle capacity by selecting from multiple automated guided vehicles with different carrying capacities. Based on analyzed shopping patterns, the system optimizes the capacity parameter to match actual customer needs, eliminating the inconvenience of both overloading and underloading.
2Loss of time
If customers navigate to product areas based on memory, then they can find necessities quickly, but they often go wrong places due to ill memories or differences in purchase items
Solution Approach 1:
The system introduces an intermediary component - the automated guided vehicle equipped with navigation capabilities. The vehicle acts as a mediator between the customer and product locations, providing accurate route guidance based on the analyzed shopping list, thereby eliminating navigation errors while maintaining quick access to necessities.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary analysis of customer shopping history and purchase patterns before the customer even enters the shopping area. This advance preparation allows the system to pre-determine the optimal navigation route and vehicle assignment, ensuring both time efficiency and navigation accuracy from the start.
3Ease of operation
If fixed capacity trolleys are used, then the system is simple to operate, but customers experience inconvenience due to overload or insufficient occupation
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs self-service by automatically analyzing customer shopping patterns, predicting purchase volume, and assigning appropriate vehicles without requiring customer input. This automated decision-making process maintains system simplicity from the customer's perspective while dramatically improving shopping efficiency through optimal vehicle-capacity matching.
Data Source
AI summary
An automated guided vehicle control system includes a commodity database, a historical shopping information acquisition module, a purchase-item prediction module, an automated guided vehicle database, an automated guided vehicle dispatch demand assessment module and an automated guided vehicle dispatch module. The historical shopping information acquisition module is utilized to retrieve the historical shopping information related to the customer, further to locate the instant predicted commodity to be purchased, and thereby to dispatch the suitable automated guided vehicle to the waiting area of the customer. Further, the historical shopping information is evaluated to provide the commodity type options for the customer to select, to locate the commodity type to be purchased, and thereby to organize the automated navigation path for the automated guided vehicle to travel along to reach the assigned commodity display area.