Warehouse Simulation Through Model Configuration

The pre-build development of warehouse systems leads from a specific customer request to a specific customer quotation. This involves a process of configuring a warehouse system using a sequence of steps that contain increasingly more details. Simulation is a helpful tool in analyzing warehouse design alternatives, but setting up a detailed simulation is too expensive early in the development process. We show that configurable simulation models can be applied early in the development process with a good cost/benefit ratio. We present a warehouse simulation model that can be configured with customer and topology information and decision algorithms. We show that the simulation results are similar to those of detailed simulations while a warehouse simulation can be configured with little effort and the simulations run fast enough to support sensitivity analysis and design-space exploration