Material Flow - Safety First

Challenge

This project is related to operations in a set of warehouses. The focus was on the movement of people and equipment: forklifts, pallet jacks, and AGVs responsible for moving materials, plus trucks transporting materials to the warehouse. In addition to normal flow of people, there are production lines where operations are concentrated. The client was concerned with personnel safety, so the main objective was to define the most critical areas of intersection between people and equipment, and understand bottleneck locations where congestion might occur.

Solution

A simulation model was built in AnyLogic using discrete-events. Architectural drawings were used to prepare the layout using wall elements and nodes to represent rooms and work areas. Both the material handling library and the pedestrian library were used.

Key Technical Challenges

One challenge was that equipment movement had to be free (no specific paths) but certain locations needed to be avoided by each equipment type. This was solved by using free space movement with additional walls and restricted nodes to guide transporters without using path-guided movement.

Safety Zone Analysis

To specify zones of safety concern, the warehouse area was divided into small zones (meshes) and raw information about the passage of people and equipment through areas of interest was exported. The client also requested the ability to define these areas dynamically through an Excel sheet instead of defining them as nodes in the model.

Outcome

The client was able to identify critical safety areas and propose modifications to warehouse layouts to reduce both safety and congestion problems.

Project Features

• Industry: Manufacturing, Safety
• Model: Discrete Events
• Duration: 3 months