Storage is costly for manufacturers and distributors alike. Indeed, ‘just in time delivery’ transformed the economics of many companies simply by reducing their burden of storage. Yet in any warehouse, over half the space is always empty — the bays and aisles needed for access to the goods.
In this connection Daedalus recalls the ‘15 puzzle’, the mathematical amusement in which a tray of four units square contains 15 numbered tiles and one space. By repeatedly moving an adjacent tile into the space, you can shuffle the tiles into almost any chosen pattern. (In fact, just half the imaginable arrangements are accessible.) So DREADCO engineers are now inventing a ‘15-puzzle warehouse’. Instead of a fixed floor, it has a number of mobile platforms running on a grid of rails set out in a square pattern. Each platform carries a tower of pallets bearing the goods to be stored. They completely fill the warehouse, except for one space. Yet that single space allows the platforms to be shuffled indefinitely. Any desired platform can be rapidly brought to the loading bay for the delivery or replenishment of its contents.
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