The Importance of Internal Transport in Organizing High-Bay Warehouses

The article presents internal transport system and principles of transport organization, in order to indicate that the effectiveness of material flow management in a warehouse depends on the transport strategy used by a manufacturing plant. In the paper different means of transport enabling movement of components and semi-finished products are described. From the perspective of industrial plants, minimizing the number of transport resources and maximizing the use of devices needed to operate the storage process play an important role in effective implementation of logistics processes. At the same time, it is necessary to optimize the transport processes in terms of both time and costs. In the paper the possibility to meet these requirements on the example of a high-bay warehouse is verified, based on simulation of loading and unloading operations. Indicators intended to assess the quality of storage process are presented and used to determine the optimal number of transport resources required to operate the proposed warehouse. The results obtained during simulations are the basis for discussion on the influence of a number of transport resources on operating time of the analyzed warehouse.