Proceedings of the 2
nd
Indian International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management
Warangal, Telangana, India, August 16-18, 2022
© IEOM Society International
Application of Simulation in Warehouse Management
Vaibhav Kankal
Second Year M. Tech Project Management
Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Industrial Management
College of Engineering, Pune, Maharashtra, India
Kankalvn20.mfg@coep.ac.in
N. R. Rajhans
Professor
Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Industrial Management
College of Engineering, Pune, Maharashtra, India
nrr.mfg@coep.ac.in
Abstract
Simulation is becoming a need for the industries nowadays as the businesses are required to take critical decisions
frequently. Simulation has various applications in many areas. The current research focuses on simulating the
warehouse situation. A simulation model of the warehouse is built by using Witness 2021 simulation software. The
model is also validated by comparing it to a real-life situation. After running the model for a certain time, the statistics
have been collected for the model. This will help to understand the existing situation for the warehouse. Then the
efforts are made to reduce the queues. For that what-if- scenarios are generated. Based on these scenarios, the
experiments have been conducted in the Witness experimenter. The results for these experiments are then analyzed
and the best results with alternative solutions are provided.
Keywords
Simulation, Warehouse, Warehouse management, Simulation application, Queue management.
1. Introduction
The fourth industrial revolution brought the modern technology into the manufacturing. It integrates various modern
technologies which include internet of things, cloud technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning into
manufacturing. Industry 4.0 represents a new industrial stage of the manufacturing systems by integrating a set of
emerging and convergent technologies that add value to the whole product lifecycle (Dalenogare et al. 2018).
Industry 4.0 has nine technological pillars one of these pillars which are internet of things, augmented reality,
simulation, additive manufacturing, system integration, cloud computing, autonomous systems, cybersecurity and big
data analysis.
Simulation is one of the most important pillars of the industry 4.0 as it is the only one pillar which deals with the
future analysis of the process. Simulation can reduce the cycle times and it can lead to less failures in the start-up
phase of production (Simons et al. 2017).Schuhet al. (2014) mentioned that it will be easy and efficient to take
decisions and the quality of decisions can be significantly improved by easy and quickly with simulations.
Simulation gives a single point solution to the digital manufacturing. This is because of the multi utility nature of the
simulation software which not only allow users to develop the model but also let them experiment with them and
validate (Mourtziset al. 2014).
This study deals with the process of simulation by using the DES simulation tool Witness 24 developed by the Lanner
group based in UK. Witness is a process modelling and simulation software. Currently witness is used in many
industries within different sectors. Witness allows users to build the digital model of the business which can be
simulated for any period, and it helps users to analyze the model by generating various reports in the witness.
Witness is very useful for solving real-life problems. In this paper, similar application of Witness in reducing the
queue lengths is carried out.
786