Design and simulation of an industrial automated overhead warehouse

This paper is a description of an automated overhead warehouse system, developed to store car seat covers and then to feed them to the Renault car assembly plant at Palencia (Spain). It is based on trolleys moved through monorails and stored in accumulation bars (or monorails) by gravity, having to fulfil space and shape constraints, low retrieval time requirements, etc. This paper presents the decision process and the solutions adopted in this project to overcome the constraints and to fulfil the specifications. Also, a simulation tool integrated in an object‐ oriented designing framework is presented. It has been developed to support the decision‐making process, especially at the very beginning of the project.