the biggest autonomous shuttle warehouse in the world

About

Company
Dematra
Location
Nazareth, Belgium
Competences

robotics & controls

industrial IoT

digital twin simulation

automation

capture (fleet&data platform)

interact (custom HMI-platform)

warehouse logistics

a choreography of shuttles for the biggest autonomous shuttle warehouse in the world

relevance

Dematra specializes in the storage and distribution of food and non-food products. Think of customers such as Alpro or Lay’s who distribute their products from the Dematra warehouse. A brand new conditioned pallet warehouse is being built on their site in Nazareth, mainly for temperature-controlled food. With this fourth warehouse in Belgium, Dematra doubles its capacity in one fell swoop.


Movu Robotics, part of the stow Group, is a global player in industrial storage solutions. Movu Robotics was responsible for the storage racks and the autonomous shuttles that move the pallets horizontally in the gigantic warehouse.

The experience for me and the entire stow team has been very positive. The people of vintecc are open and always accessible. My colleague Koen once said: “If you have a problem, just call vintecc via Teams for a solution.” That’s how it actually works. To me the vintecc people are ”one of us” and that is of course great to work together like this. Short connection lines and effective communication.

Christoph Harinck

Christoph Harinck

Product Expert - Movu Robotics

challenge

The built area of the site, 10,000m2, is exceptionally compact. 

But add that to 15 floors, add to that the irregular shapes of each floor to maximize surface area, an exceptional fleet of 32 fully autonomous shuttles and the fact that each pallet is only moved when the truck is at the quay ( just-in-time concept). 

You don't have to be an engineer to know that the vintecc team faced a gigantic task to develop the traffic technology that would ensure a perfectly orchestrated choreography between all autonomous shuttles. 


Challenge accepted!

Solution

Fortunately, the team did not have to start from scratch and momentum was immediately created for the development of the warehouse project.

1 virtual validation by digital twin simulation
  • The warehouse design of the stow Group could be immediately imported into dual at the correct scale. dual is vintecc’s own digital-twin-as-a-service platform and is used when – in this case – a new logistics concept needs to be tested and validated virtually before it is actually put into use. 
  • The development time and commissioning of the warehouse could be accelerated in this way.
2 robotics & controls
  • The robotics & controls team – of both Movu Robotics and vintecc – put all the know-how on the table to develop the planning algorithm for the traffic controller. It determines how and which path the Atlas 2D shuttles must take to get from point A to point B without colliding with other shuttles or other obstacles.
  • The shuttle software – on board the shuttle – in turn takes care of scanning the right pallet, picking it up and dropping it off at the right place, completely autonomously.
3 accelerate with our own IoT platform
  • capture - vintecc's own Industrial IoT platform - ensured the centralization of all data logging from each shuttle. capture was therefore an overarching help for the entire project. The IoT platform not only made it possible to evaluate the performance of each shuttle, but also enabled rapid debugging during development - even remotely. 
  • With a 3D heat map of alarms per location, Movu technicians immediately had insight into possible physical errors - such as a dropped piece of cardboard in front of a sensor - that disrupted the system.
  • Since every movement was registered, throughput measurements provided real-time insight into the efficiency of the entire warehouse.
4 watch live shuttle movements
  • Both in the virtual simulation and when the first shuttles were commissioned, the team was able to follow the shuttles’ movements live on each floor via a custom HMI. 
  • This HMI was set up in record time using interact – a HMI & scada platform developed in-house by Vintecc, specifically set up for this type of application.

results

1 time and budget gain
  • Honestly, it’s difficult to compare since the scale of this project is so unique, but we dare to say that the combination of in-house technology and know-how has reduced the development costs for this total project by a factor of 2 to 2.5.
  • Let’s just say that Movu Robotics and Dematra saved a huge amount of time in the development process and thus approached everything very cost-efficiently.
2 downtime reduced
  • New ‘traffic’ concepts or possible updates can first be tested and simulated virtually before commissioning. 
  • For example, the downtime of the entire system decreases when an adapted ‘traffic’ concept is introduced and the efficiency of the warehouse increases.
3 sustainable and flexible
  • The shuttle management of the exceptional shuttle fleet is sustainable and future-proof. 
  • The two-way communication capabilities of the capture platform used allow easy and remote updates to be carried out on the control system or on the individual shuttles.
previous case