An investigation of mean energy demand, performance and reference cycles for stacker cranes

Abstract

Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS-RS) are commonly used in intralogistic facilities and are often operated by stacker cranes. These stacker cranes are used in high-bay warehouses to move small load carriers, pallets and special load carriers. This paper presents an approach for the determination of the mean energy demand of stacker cranes, using a reference cycle. The examanition of the reference cycles is based on a large scale simulation experiment with randomly generated stacker crane and rack configurations and operation tasks. The results permitted an analysis of the correlations between various paramters e.g. energy demand and performance of stacker cranes. Subsequently, three different reference cycles which allow an easy and fast calculation of the mean energy demand are developed and evaluated.