Warehouse Automation

Warehouse systems get automated to an unprecedented level. This is made possible by advances in compute. Advanced algorithms control box provisioning from cube storage systems as well as pick-and-place of arbitrary items by robotic arms.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson

One of our customers asked us to identify optimization potentials in their new state-of-the-art warehouse. We have intercepted TCP and SPS traffic, loaded that and data from the middleware into BigQuery. We recorded details about the facility operation on video and performed frame-by-frame analysis. Our analysis of the data revealed substantial potential for optimization of throughput (+50%) as well as reduction of error rates (-23%). The knowledge also allowed us to create a digital twin of the warehouse as an AnyLogic-Simulation. From it, we were able to derive insights about potential bottlenecks and also to give recommendations regarding the design of facility extensions. In a next step we are going to optimize further using LP and monte-carlo based on the digital twin.

If you run a warehouse and want to keep your competitive advantage, you should realize how important software has become. As for so many other businesses, leveraging opportunities in warehouse optimization depends upon your new core asset: Your ability to execute fast in software and data.

"Software is eating the world." - Marc Andreessen

In most warehouses the employees carry supercomputers in their pockets but the facility logic is dumb. This need not be the case. When will you level up?