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Recently, JD Logistics Kunshan Unmanned Sorting Center, known as “the world’s first full-process unmanned sorting center”, has just unveiled and has attracted great attention from all parties in the industry. On September 21st, our reporter was invited to the warehouse site to experience JD Logistics’ continuous innovation and exploration in smart logistics technology and practice.
Overall layout of Kunshan unmanned sorting center
Project Background
Self-built logistics has always been a magic weapon for JD to win the market. In order to continuously strengthen this advantage, JD has always spared no effort in its investment in logistics, and has achieved remarkable results. At present, JD has the largest logistics infrastructure and network in the national e-commerce industry. As of June 30, 2017, it has 7 logistics centers nationwide, operates 335 large warehouses, and its logistics network covers 2691 districts and counties.
Jingdong Group CEO Liu Qiangdong once emphasized the future development strategy of Jingdong at the 2017 group opening meeting-will firmly face the technological transformation, and use technology to respond to the rapidly changing world. It is under the guidance of this strategy that JD Logistics has accelerated its technological development in an all-round way, including the continuous exploration of smart logistics, the creation of unmanned warehouses centered on intelligent equipment such as robots, and unmanned distribution.
In terms of smart warehousing, the “Asia One” project officially launched in 2010 has become a model of JD’s self-built logistics. Through the large-scale application of automated equipment and smart management systems in storage, picking, packaging, transportation, and sorting, Logistics costs and improve operational efficiency. At present, “Asia One” has become a representative of the modern operation center of China’s e-commerce industry in terms of its size and processing capacity. Put into use. In the next five years, JD Logistics will continue to build “Asia One” in more than 30 core cities across the country to achieve comprehensive coverage of the seven regions of the country with an intelligent warehousing operation network.
In addition to the increasing scale, the efficiency of “Asia One” is also constantly improving. During the 618 period this year, the sorting capacity of the Kunshan “Asia One” automatic sorting system, which was launched for the first time, was as high as 40,000 pieces per hour. The sorting capacity of the entire sorting center exceeded 1 million pieces per day, which was more than 10 times the efficiency of manual sorting. The accuracy rate reached 99.99%; Guangzhou “Asia One” broke the domestic single warehouse industry record with the amount of 570,000 single warehouse orders; the flagship project Shanghai “Asia One” achieved more than 90% of operation automation. The efficiency of one sorter can reach up to 27,000 pieces/hour.
It can be seen that in the “Asia One” project, JD Logistics has even achieved a leading level on a global scale. However, with the independent opening of JD Logistics, it is bound to deal with greater social logistics, especially the sharp increase in the sorting demand for small and medium-sized goods, so the efficiency requirements of the sorting link are getting higher and higher. Driven by the increasing market demand and JD’s continuous exploration of advanced technology and smart logistics, JD began planning to build an unmanned sorting center in Kunshan. The picking process has entered a new stage of unmanned and intelligent, and its road of intelligent logistics exploration has reached a new milestone.
Project positioning and overview
Kunshan Unmanned Sorting Center, as one of the many unmanned strategic projects of JD Logistics, focuses on the unmannedness of the entire transfer link, and is positioned to replace labor with machines to achieve rapid and efficient transfer of goods, while liberating manpower and greatly reducing the scene Operation is abnormal and customer satisfaction is improved.
The center is mainly divided into automatic unloading area, arrival buffer area, empty cage storage area, dumping area (dumping the goods in the cage into the conveyor line), single-piece separation area, sorting area, empty cage waiting area, AGV Multiple functional zones such as charging area, RFID identification area, and AGV self-delivery area (loading area).
Dumping area
Single piece separation area
Sorting area layout
AGV from the shipping area
The automation system equipment in the center is mainly invested in two phases. The equipment invested in the first phase includes high-speed cross-belt sorter system, conveyor system, AGV, cage box and automatic anti-falling roller shutter, cage box guide rail, and a large number of scanning and reading equipment.
Sorting area
Unmanned AGV automatic charging area
Cage storage area
The equipment invested in the second phase is mainly automatic unloading equipment, single piece separation equipment, etc. Among them, 25 AGVs complete autonomous handling, automatic avoidance, priority task execution and other tasks through the AGV scheduling system and automatically charge them. The operations in the entire unmanned sorting center are commanded and managed by the task management and control center DCS intelligent control system (equivalent to the WCS system) independently developed by Jingdong, such as the automatic control of high-speed cross-belt sorters, the handling and scheduling of AGVs, and RFID information Processing and other functions.
control center
Main work flow
(1) Automatic dump truck
JD Logistics Vehicle will carry the packaged express parcels (size less than 500×500×500mm, all types of goods except non-liquid and fragile products) in 13 warehouses covered by the Kunshan unmanned sorting center. The box is transported to the Kunshan unmanned sorting center platform, and the system automatically dispatches unloading tasks for the AGV. After the AGV takes out the cage from the fork in the compartment, the cage is directly transported to the dumping area or to the temporary storage area according to the busyness of the business.
(2) Automatic package supply
Use automatic dumping equipment to place the goods in the cage on the conveyor line. The goods are sent to the single-piece separation area along the conveyor line, and the empty cage is sent to the empty cage storage area by the AGV.
(3) Automatic separation
The conveyor line diverges the parcels to three belt conveyors, separates the parcels through an automatic single-piece separation device, and allows the parcels to be automatically pulled over on the conveyor line. The package is automatically centered when it reaches the conveyor line of the sorting system, and the volume and weight of the package are measured by the measuring light curtain, and then uploaded to the IPMS intelligent production management system. At the same time, the SVDT traceable video monitoring system can query and track all data in real time.
(4) Auto scan
The parcels along the sorting system’s conveyor line pass through the bottom surface scanning first, and then pass through the 5-sided scanning device to realize the six-sided scanning of the parcels to ensure that the face list information is quickly identified and uploaded to the system.
Scanning device
The goods enter the cross belt sorter system after being scanned on the conveyor line and six sides
If there is an abnormal scan, the system will directly assign it to the abnormal compartment and drop it into the cage and wait for subsequent processing.
(5) Automatic sorting and unpacking
The system allocates the grid according to the package information, and at the same time controls the cross-belt sorter to drop into the corresponding cage. Due to the distance between the grid and the ground, in order to prevent the package from falling out of the cage, and at the same time to buffer the high-speed sliding package to protect the package, the upper part of the cage is equipped with an anti-falling roller shutter. The falling roller blind automatically rises.
Cross belt sorter system
Automatic lifting roller shutter
(6) Automatic pickup
The sensing device in the cage can sense the loading status of the goods. When it is full, it will automatically send a signal to the control system, and the control system will stop the unpacking operation of the grid and dispatch the AGV to pick up the goods. At the same time, the system will issue instructions to another AGV to deliver the cages temporarily stored in the empty cage waiting area to the slot, and the system will restore the bag drop instruction at the slot at the same time. During this period, the cages will continue to be restocked from the storage area to the waiting area.
Cage waiting area
AGV operating area
The AGV takes the fork of the cage full of goods to the cage conveying rail. The motor of the guide rail provides power to transport the cage to the AGV self-delivery area. At the same time, the guide rail can also play a role in cage storage. The AGV on the delivery platform removes the cage from the guide rail, passes through the RFID identification area, and the system identifies whether there is an abnormal delivery order. If there is no abnormality, the AGV directly sends the cage to the JD logistics vehicle waiting on the platform.
RFID identification on the ground
There are two types of JD logistics vehicles. One is equipped with cage conveyor guide rails in the carriage, and the AGV puts the cage into the guide rail to complete the loading operation; the other is without guide rails, and the AGV needs to be placed in the car. Cage box. In order to better protect the goods in the cage, the two side walls in the carriage have also been specially treated to facilitate the further use of ropes to fix the cage.
According to reports, the Kunshan unmanned sorting center can significantly improve the sorting efficiency, with a sorting capacity of 9,000 pieces per hour, and at the same time greatly save personnel-on the premise of the same site size and sorting volume, it is estimated that the center can save 180 People, the operation effect reaches the expectation.
Since the second phase of the automation equipment such as the single piece separation system and the automatic unloading system is not yet in place, manual auxiliary feeding is still required at the front end, and the true full-process unmanned operation is expected to be realized by the end of the year. At that time, the efficiency of the automatic packaging platform will be more than 4 times higher than the efficiency of manual packaging, and it will truly realize the seamless connection of unmanned operation and automation of the whole process from unloading to sorting to loading, making the sorting operation smooth and efficient . However, judging from the current trial operation, the center is still a representative of a high degree of automation.
First of all, AGV has been applied on a large scale, realizing the first automatic loading and unloading operation of AGV in the front and back ends of the sorting in the country.
Secondly, it realizes the accurate scanning of the six sides of the package and the rapid identification of the information of the face list, which provides a guarantee for the sorting system to realize fast and accurate sorting.
Third, the use of RFID to identify shipment orders further ensures the accuracy of shipments.
Fourth, although the transportation method with cages will lose part of the loading space and reduce the loading volume by about 20%, it can effectively protect the package from damage, and the loading efficiency has also been greatly improved. It takes 30 minutes to fill a car. /Car is shortened to 5 minutes/car.
The person in charge of JD Logistics said that the trial operation of the Kunshan unmanned sorting center represents another acceleration of JD’s smart logistics exploration. In the future, JD will continue to increase technological investment and innovation breakthroughs, and is committed to becoming a domestic retail infrastructure service provider, and will serve the entire society with high-efficiency, low-cost, and highly intelligent smart supply chain solutions.
