Go to Home

Logistic Warehouse Simulations

Overview

Logistic warehouses are among critical nodes of a supply chain. Therefore, it is crucial to improve on their performance in order to avoid unproductive bottlenecks. Warehouse optimization concerns several aspects, some of them must be considered during the design time while others during real-time operations.
We conduct a study about the impact of warehouse layouts and resource allocation with regard to the employment of AGVs on the productivity of a logistic center. Thus, we have developed an agent based simulator (WHSim).
By means of this simulator, we have compared three given layouts adopting different resource allocation strategies and then we have evaluated warehouse performance for each layout.
The simulator can be used as a decision support tool, which makes easy to choice a warehouse configuration providing the most favorable throughput in terms of number of AGVs to employ and physical layout to be adopted. In addition, the simulations provide some useful information that could improve on the warehouse management.
This work was stimulated by a collaboration with logistic domain experts for the definition of best practices and tools to the aim of increasing the potential of logistic warehouses that use AGVs in their business.

The results of our experiments can be dowloaded here.

See simulation movies.

Go to Home