Simulation of an Automated Warehouse for Steel Tubes

The paper presents a software which simulates an existing automated warehouse of steel tubes, including all the movements of the tubes packs conveyors as well as the management of all the operations for their storage and recovery for delivery to customers. The reason to develop such simulator lies in the needing to test new stocking strategies, that could overcome the drawback of the ones which are already implemented in the current system. Such strategies and their possible improvements are presented and discussed. As the simulator elaborates as inputs the real data of the tubes production and customer orders exactly in the format in which they are processed by the real automated warehouse management, realistic simulations are possible. Numerical results are shown, which demonstrates that the proposed improvements in the tube packs allocation and reordering successfully increase the warehouse capacity and efficiency through an improved exploitation of the available space.