Automated materials handling. Modern warehouses use computerized and automated guided vehicles for materials handling. Consequently, the physical layout of the warehouse must be carefully designed to prevent vehicle congestion and optimize response time. Optimal design of an automated warehouse was studied in the Journal of Engineering for Industry (August 1993). The layout assumes that vehicles do not block each other when they travel within the warehouse (i.e., that there is no congestion). The validity of this assumption was checked by simulating (on a computer) warehouse operations.
In each simulation, the number of vehicles was varied and the congestion time (total time one vehicle blocked another) was recorded. The data are shown in the accompanying table. Of interest to the researchers is the relationship between congestion time (y) and number of vehicles (x). Conduct a complete simple linear regression analysis.
