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M.M.A. van Beek
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Automated cold storage warehouses increasingly rely on automation to manage growing throughput demands, labour complexities, and sustainability requirements. However, the design of outbound buffer areas remains underexplored relative to long-term storage and retrieval processes. Fixed buffer lanes, commonly used to stage pallets ahead of truck pickup, create a structural mismatch with the stochastic nature of truck arrivals. When trucks are delayed, buffer lanes fill up, disrupting outbound flow and forcing manual exception handling. Shuttle-based storage and retrieval systems (SBS/RS) are identified in the literature as a promising alternative, given their fast-retrieval, small-footprint, and flexible release characteristics. Their application to outbound dispatch buffering, particularly in a cold-storage context and grounded in real operational data, remains largely unexplored. This research investigates how a shuttle-based dispatch buffer can be designed and controlled to minimise crane congestion and outbound delays in an automated cold-storage warehouse, using NewCold's Piacenza facility as a case study. The research combines a literature review and expert consultation with a system analysis and a discrete-event simulation model, built in Simio, validated against real operational data from the existing Piacenza warehouse. Three scenarios are compared: a validated baseline reflecting the current traditional bufferlane layout, a shuttle-based buffer design where picked pallets return to the highbay before staging, and a variant where picked pallets are routed directly into the shuttle buffer. The results show that a shuttle-based dispatch buffer's core mechanism, decoupling pallet retrieval from truck-arrival timing, substantially reduces the outbound system's dependence on truck-arrival forecasting accuracy. Routing picked pallets directly into the buffer further reduces the total crane workload required per pallet, creating an opportunity to operate with a smaller crane fleet for comparable outbound performance. This benefit does not come without cost: a smaller crane fleet operates closer to its capacity limit, and an under-resourced buffer configuration is shown to destabilise the system rather than absorb demand, confirming that such a design must be deliberately dimensioned rather than assumed to work at any scale. For the wider automated cold-storage warehouse industry, the findings demonstrate that a shuttle-based dispatch buffer's primary value lies in decoupling outbound operations from arrival uncertainty and reallocating pressure away from cranes, rather than in a proportional reduction in total truck dwell time, an important distinction for operators evaluating similar designs on throughput metrics alone. Academically, this research addresses a gap in the shuttle-based storage and retrieval system literature by applying this technology to an outbound dispatch-buffering role, validated against real operational data, and identifies crane capacity as an external coordination dependency not previously characterised in studies treating the shuttle system as self-contained.
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Automated cold storage warehouses increasingly rely on automation to manage growing throughput demands, labour complexities, and sustainability requirements. However, the design of outbound buffer areas remains underexplored relative to long-term storage and retrieval processes. Fixed buffer lanes, commonly used to stage pallets ahead of truck pickup, create a structural mismatch with the stochastic nature of truck arrivals. When trucks are delayed, buffer lanes fill up, disrupting outbound flow and forcing manual exception handling. Shuttle-based storage and retrieval systems (SBS/RS) are identified in the literature as a promising alternative, given their fast-retrieval, small-footprint, and flexible release characteristics. Their application to outbound dispatch buffering, particularly in a cold-storage context and grounded in real operational data, remains largely unexplored. This research investigates how a shuttle-based dispatch buffer can be designed and controlled to minimise crane congestion and outbound delays in an automated cold-storage warehouse, using NewCold's Piacenza facility as a case study. The research combines a literature review and expert consultation with a system analysis and a discrete-event simulation model, built in Simio, validated against real operational data from the existing Piacenza warehouse. Three scenarios are compared: a validated baseline reflecting the current traditional bufferlane layout, a shuttle-based buffer design where picked pallets return to the highbay before staging, and a variant where picked pallets are routed directly into the shuttle buffer. The results show that a shuttle-based dispatch buffer's core mechanism, decoupling pallet retrieval from truck-arrival timing, substantially reduces the outbound system's dependence on truck-arrival forecasting accuracy. Routing picked pallets directly into the buffer further reduces the total crane workload required per pallet, creating an opportunity to operate with a smaller crane fleet for comparable outbound performance. This benefit does not come without cost: a smaller crane fleet operates closer to its capacity limit, and an under-resourced buffer configuration is shown to destabilise the system rather than absorb demand, confirming that such a design must be deliberately dimensioned rather than assumed to work at any scale. For the wider automated cold-storage warehouse industry, the findings demonstrate that a shuttle-based dispatch buffer's primary value lies in decoupling outbound operations from arrival uncertainty and reallocating pressure away from cranes, rather than in a proportional reduction in total truck dwell time, an important distinction for operators evaluating similar designs on throughput metrics alone. Academically, this research addresses a gap in the shuttle-based storage and retrieval system literature by applying this technology to an outbound dispatch-buffering role, validated against real operational data, and identifies crane capacity as an external coordination dependency not previously characterised in studies treating the shuttle system as self-contained.