In our continued look at ProModel for AutoCAD, Inventor, and Factory Design Utilities, we take a look at Warehouse Optimization. (Click here for the previous post)
In this example, a customer is looking to validate truck unloading. They have snow blowers and tractors to unload in a 10 hour shift. As we can see, the layout consists of Factory Design Utility assets representing the racks, as well as the forktruck in the lower right that will do the unloading tasks.
We can create the product flows right in the AutoCAD drawing that represents the proposed layout. ProModel’s easy to use interfaced allow us to rapidly create the simulation. We first add locations – these would be where the fork truck will put away the items – and specify how many can be loaded into each rack.
We’ll next specify the path that the fork trucks will follow to put away the products. Each dot represents where the forktruck will stop – and the connection lines give the paths to follow. We then tell ProModel which location ties to which stop for the fork truck.