Conveyor system with buffer arrangement

Details Conveyor system with buffer arrangement Conveyor system with buffer arrangement

2001-02-07

2004-09-14

Walsh, Donald P. (Department: 3653)

Conveyors: power-driven

Conveyor system having auxiliary section for storing items...

C198S347400, C198S347200, C198S370010, C209S583000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06789660

ABSTRACT:

TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to a conveyor system and the operation of a conveyor system for conveying articles, such as e.g. baggage at an airport, in which system a buffer arrangement is provided for storing and pre-sorting of at least a part of the article-flow through the system. A conveyor system for conveying and sorting articles for a number of different destinations may be operated with a much lower number of stations for discharging the articles if the possibility of pre-sorting and temporarily storing the articles exists within the system.
In particular, the invention concerns a storage rack for storing articles and a conveyor system comprising such a storage rack.
BACKGROUND ART
A sorting and storage system for pieces of goods such as flight luggage is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,301,790, in which the luggage is placed on totes situated on a conveyor with tiltable carrying platforms. The luggage may be conveyed directly to one of a number of destinations where it is unloaded from the tote, or it may be temporarily placed in a storage unit until a destination for that particular luggage is opened, whereupon the luggage is conveyed to that destination and unloaded from the tote.
Storage systems for storing early bags in a baggage handling system are also disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,413,205 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,575,375. These storage systems comprise a conveyor with multiple tray carriers arranged in a serpentine fashion for efficient use of horizontal space. Such storage systems are primarily used for storage of so-called early bags for which the destinations are not opened yet.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION
Conveyor systems for e.g. airports for conveying and sorting items, such as luggage, for a number of different destinations need to have a high number of discharge stations for discharging items for specific destinations, because a number of the items that pass the system are entered into the system several hours before the term for discharging the items, e.g. at the make-up operation for a desired flight departure. Therefore, a discharge station must be open for items for a specific destination for a long period of time before the term for discharge for that specific destination, thus requiring the system to comprise a high number of discharge stations. Furthermore, some items arrive to the conveyor system much earlier than the aforementioned items, often referred to in terms of airport systems as “early bags”, which is baggage that is checked-in very early or baggage in transit. Most systems include an early bag storage unit, such as one or more long conveyors upon which the early bags may be temporarily stored until a discharge station is opened for baggage with the specific destination of the early bags.
A high number of discharge stations are costly to install and to maintain and they take up very large areas because of the area requirements for providing access for trucks etc. to each discharge station. Also, the early bag storage units that are formed as long endless conveyors take up plenty of area, for which reason the capacity of those storage units have to be limited.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a conveyor system with means for reducing the number of discharge stations required for an efficient operation of the system without reducing the sorting capacity or the conveying capacity of the system.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a storage arrangement that enables pre-sorting of the stored items according to their destination and/or the their term of departure so that items with a specific destination may be retracted quickly from the storage arrangement and moved to a discharge station dedicated to that specific destination.
It is a still further object to provide a storage arrangement in which the items may be stored in a compact manner so that the area requirements for the storage arrangement are low.
It is an advantage that the items are placed on trays before they are entered onto the conveyor in order to minimise the risk of damaging the items when they are conveyed and to prevent that parts of the items, such as e.g. handles or belts, get stuck in the conveyor parts. Furthermore, the trays are more easy to convey and handle by the conveyor systems and especially for a storage arrangement since they are uniform objects in contrast to e.g. baggage.
Thus the present invention relates to a method of conveying items using a system comprising conveyors and at least one article storage arrangement,
(a) loading items onto trays at at least one loading station of a first conveyor,
each item being identified and assigned to a destination belonging to a group of predefined destinations,
 to thereby create articles, each article consisting of a tray carrying at least one item,
(b) conveying articles in the first conveyor, the first conveyor being capable of conveying articles from the at least one loading station to an article storage arrangement comprising a plurality of storage units in each of which a plurality of articles may be stored,
(c) moving at least some of the articles from the first conveyor into storage units of the articles storage arrangement,
(d) determining to which set of articles belonging to a predefined group of sets each of said articles belongs according to the destination of the at least one item of the article, at least one of the plurality of storage units being assigned to each of said sets,
(e) storing each article in one of the at least one storage unit being assigned to the set to which the article belongs,
(f) allocating at least one discharge station of a second conveyor,
the second conveyor being adapted to convey articles from the article storage arrangement to the at least one discharge station,
 to a destination belonging to the group of predefined destinations,
(g) moving at least some of the articles stored in the article storage arrangement and
being assigned to said destination from the storage units and to the second conveyor,
(h) conveying said articles in the second conveyor to said discharge station, and
(i) discharging the items from the trays of said articles at said discharge station.
A plurality of storage units within the storage arrangement makes it possible to pre-sort the articles when they enters the article storage arrangement. The control means for controlling the operation of the conveyor system may comprise a central control unit that controls all operations or it may comprise a number of distributed units that each controls a part of the conveyor system, and preferably control means comprise a combination of a central control unit and a number of distributed units. The control means may further comprise a number of sensor means, such as photo cells or photosensors, cameras, stress sensitive sensors etc., for detecting the presence of articles at various positions on the conveyor system, sensor means for detecting the conveying speed at various positions along the conveyor system, data entering means for manually entering data into the control system, scanning means for scanning identification marks of items and/or trays conveyed by the system, etc.
It is an advantage for efficient operation of the system that substantially all of the articles are entered into the article storage arrangement in step (c) so that the discharge stations only have to be allocated to receive items for a given destination for a short period at a time, typically a period of the order of 5-15 minutes, because the articles to be conveyed to the discharge station within the period are present in the article storage arrangement. Thus, the discharge station is only occupied for the short period in which at least a part of the amount of items for a given destination are discharged, and the discharge station may be allocated to another destination. The discharge stations are utilised very intensively by this method and the number of discharge stations for a conveyor system of a given sorting capacity maybe reduced with 30-80%, depending on the composi

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