Looking at AS/RS in the round

The design, implementation, service and system operator know-how of Witron has been incorporated into the development of the control technology of its latest stacker crane generation.

The system is designed for continuous operation 365 days a year, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. 

“We always have a holistic mindset concerning our technical developments”, says Martin Stich, technical CEO, Witron.

With a conveying speed of over 6 m/s, an acceleration of more than 4 m/s2 and a lifting speed of 3 m/s, the cranes can transport totes and trays as well as corrugated boxes with a payload of 200kg per cycle.

There are two highly loading device units per vehicle so it is possible to move up to eight transport units at the same time during parallel storage and retrieval processes. The result: each device moves up to 600 transport units per hour. 

In practice, this performance density can only be achieved because software optimises the driving cycles accordingly.

The priority for Witron is a highly available system, first. That is why Witron balances new and proven technology.

On the maintenance side, Witron’s OnSite service team helps deliver high system availability. By doing so, Witron also benefits from an invaluable increase in experience with each individual project.

Proactive maintenance processes, based on production data acquisition and in connection with WITOOL, a self-developed web-based service management tool, also help give systems a long life span.

For Witron, the crane is primarily only one highly dynamic element in an overall logistics solution. The decisive factor for the concept, however, is to combine the elements in a reasonable way. "For our solutions, for example, it is much more economical in terms of performance and storage capacity to place two cranes with ten metres on top of each other instead of building devices that are over 20 m high”, adds Martin Stich. 

The Witron devices are also said to be innovative in terms of energy management. The Witron control logic, developed over several years, links all drives so that the respective units can operate energy-optimised in direct relation to the other units without affecting the throughput performance.