Virtual commissioning for intralogistics
Peak is a date nobody controls. We arrive with the PLC code, the sequences and the safety logic already validated against a twin of the warehouse, so the start-up window moves goods instead of debugging logic.
The go-live date is set by peak, not by the project.
Nobody chooses the go-live date: Black Friday and Christmas arrive when they arrive. Late means a season on the old system, with the automation paid for and idle. What fails is rarely one machine; it is the combination, at rate. Denver's baggage system is still the textbook case, and its faults read like a controls checklist.
The US Government Accountability Office audited the automated baggage system at Denver International Airport (GAO/RCED-95-35BR): a projected operating deficit of $18.75M a month, and about $361M as the all-in cost of the delay. It is a 1994 case, at a publicly financed airport, and GAO records mechanical and contracting failures alongside the control faults: virtual commissioning would not have prevented all of it. What transfers is the class of fault, not the figure.
We work on the PLC, and in this sector that needs saying plainly.
Our record is automotive; intralogistics gets the method. A warehouse stacks four layers: the WMS picks orders, the control layer routes items, the PLC moves the iron, the iron moves the boxes. Ours is the PLC; the layers above stay yours. Mind the inversion: this sector's "emulation" fakes the PLC to test the software above. We fake the machines to test the PLC.
Every machine in the building fails in its own way.
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Stacker cranes and AS/RS
A stacker crane owes its cycle time by contract and shares the aisle with transfer cars and shuttles. Sequences, positioning and recovery after a stop have already run before the racking is built.
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Sortation
Tilt-tray, cross-belt or shoe: at rate, a timing error is a misrouted item. The induction logic runs at the committed rate before a single parcel does.
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Conveyor networks, merges and AGVs
Blocking, starvation and merge contention live here: every section correct, the network jammed. A full day of operation runs in minutes, so the jam shows up in the model first.
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Palletising and goods-to-person
Robot, PLC and safety share the cell with an operator at the pick stations. The closest thing in a warehouse to an automotive cell, and it gets the automotive treatment: collision-free and settled before anything is bolted down.
The three disciplines that go into an automated warehouse.
Validating before start-up is already this sector's practice.
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A logistics consultancy already names our layer
Simco publishes five virtual start-up scenarios for automated warehouses. The first, Test PLC, keeps the machines virtual and puts the PLC program under test. That scenario is our job description.
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A major OEM runs a permanent emulation centre
SSI Schäfer runs a permanent WAMAS Emulation Center, Black Friday scenario included, to test its own software before it reaches the live system. One layer above ours, same conviction: prove it before peak.
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The tools for our layer are sold into this sector
Rockwell sells Emulate3D on the promise of commissioning a line before the equipment is assembled, and names material handling among its industries. We are not importing this from automotive; it is already in the warehouse.
Sources: Simco Consulting, "Puesta en servicio virtual de almacenes automáticos"; SSI Schäfer, WAMAS Emulation Center; Rockwell Automation, Emulate3D. TECNALIA also presented, at the CIO congress and under the EU project AI-MATTERS (GA No. 101100707), the research "Virtual Commissioning of Automated Warehouses via Modbus TCP: Configurable WMS–Digital Twin Integration", which applies virtual commissioning to validating logistics information systems, one layer above ours.
Several suppliers build the warehouse. The control has to be one thing.
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We work to other people's rules
We have programmed inside ten different OEM standards: naming, block structure, diagnostics and documentation to the programme's rules, not to ours. In a warehouse with equipment from three or four suppliers, that is precisely the skill the job needs.
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PLC, robot and safety, one team
The equipment ships whole. Signals between PLC, robot and safety are mapped and tested together, not in two projects that first meet on the floor.
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The people who program are the people who start it up
The same team that proved the warehouse against its twin is on site through start-up. No handover, no explaining the installation twice. Peak keeps its date, and so do you.
Our expertise is automotive: ten OEM standards delivered, among them VASS5 and VASS6, BMW and Daimler Integra Wave 6, with more than 400 validated PLC architectures and more than 1,000 robots programmed.