Shuttle WCS

In the 1980’s a European company developed the first shuttle storage. The shuttles are two-way shuttles, pulled by a cable. In the USA the system was licensed by Retrotech, Rochester, NY, and sold under the Activ name.

In 2017 Retrotech became part of Dematic.

In the 1990’s I developed a Warehouse Control System for Activ storages in Europe, called the LSS. The LSS was successfully installed in five warehouses of three different customers. In each of these cases the LSS achieved a significant performance improvement, both in terms of in- and output throughput as well as storage capacity. The LSS shines particularly in projects with competing, contradictory pallets flows, and in projects with a higher number of SKU’s.

Recently I have modernized the LSS, upgraded its code to accommodate modern computing hardware, modern plc’s, and evolved software development best practices.

Below shows a recently developed simulation.

My knowledge and experience may of interest to you. Contact me if you are developing your own WCS for an Activ storage and you want advice on

• technical design choices,
• how to cope with warehouse (re-)organisation, route planning, route scheduling, congestion management, and deadlock prevention,
• how to improve warehouse performance in general.

My LSS may be of interest to you as well. Contact me if you have an Activ storage and

• want to improve the overall performance of the warehouse,
• need to adapt to changes in required pallet flow,
• are considering the possibility to migrate the storage from cable-pulled shuttles to modern, battery powered 4-way shuttles.