Design of Innovative Transport Systems for automated warehouses

Warehouses’ performance evaluation has often been a relevant topic of research in the field of Logistics, moreover with the increasing importance acquired by digitalization and robotics, the research has found different ways to broaden itself. In an era where e-commerce is expanding quickly, customers demand the right product at the right time and behind the ability of companies to fulfill customer orders, there is an efficient way of managing incoming orders, picking, retrieval, and storage activities. Nowadays automatic warehouses, which have to perform such activities, are widely used and they allow, in most cases, to increase the performance of the warehouse by improving its order throughput and reducing orders cycle time. One of the most efficient automatic systems, aimed at fulfilling orders, is the automatic vehicle storage and retrieval system, also called AVS/RS. The present study wants to evaluate the performance of such a system with an additional feature designed by the Italian company Eurofork: a robotic arm mounted on the shuttle. In this way, in addition to retrieval and storage activities, the system will also be able to perform picking activities. The system is evaluated through discrete event simulation and tested under different scenarios and under different storage policies to see what are the best environment, best storage policy, and best external settings that maximize its performance.