You don’t need an mathematically perfect solution to something a heuristic does well enough. I’ve actually done a lot of work involving tracking this kind of processing for industrial companies and it’s not rocket science. Warehouses are basically like giant shelves, and many of those are automated. You don’t even need smart robots to completely automate the task. If you put everything into trays and have shelves that can be remotely loaded/unloaded onto belts that move all the product then you only need people to maintain the machine and electricity to run it… Put objects here, retrieve objects there, increase scale…
You’re coming frighteningly close to describing a warehouse I visited more than ten years ago. Some books were still pulled by hand, but most were delivered to a conveyer belt by automated drop boxes. As the belt moved along the shipments were then shrink-wrapped and boxed without any human intervention.
One guy sat next to the conveyer belt watching the shipments go by. A book fell out of one shipment and was rolling along by itself. The guy didn’t bother to pick it up. I pointed this out to our tour guide, who said the automated system would eventually pick up the book, figure out which shipment it was supposed to be in, and send it separately.
I wondered why they even bothered having somebody watch the shipments go by, but I didn’t say anything. I figured the management would ask that same question soon enough.
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