Opinion: The Riskiest Automation Decisions Happen Before Deployment

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mulation allows routes, traffic rules, charging positions, and workstation locations to be tested before those decisions become physical constraints and before changes carry the risk of costly downtime. Accuracy matters more than appearance The reliability of a simulation depends on how closely it represents the vehicles, fleet-management logic and operating conditions being planned. A vehicle represented simply as a

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re vehicles to complete the same job. In a separate test, adding only a one-second delay at each crossing was enough to create a substantial difference across the system performance in the simulated scenarios. An undersized fleet may fail to complete the required work. An oversized fleet increases capital cost and requires additional charging, parking, and operating space. A 10 percent error in a three-vehicle projec

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areas, interacting at intersections, or leaving service to charge. These factors affect both throughput and the number of vehicles required. Take two vehicles with similar technical specifications. One may take five seconds to collect or deposit a pallet, and another may take 10. A third might complete the same operation quickly but be unable to raise or lower its forks while moving. Charging times introduce another

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y our team, involving around 120 vehicles, each vehicle had been represented as a point travelling at a constant speed regardless of curves or traffic conditions. With a fleet of that size, even simple modelling assumptions can significantly distort the result. A useful simulation therefore needs to reproduce the characteristics that influence real operation. At BlueBotics, our ANT vehicle simulator tool simulates th

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or a packaging producer in Japan, simulation was used to validate traffic management across a seven-vehicle, multi-brand AGV fleet comprising two pallet trucks and five unit load roll transporters. The modelling helped identify potential deadlocks and allowed the proposed layout to be adjusted before commissioning. On-site commissioning subsequently took around two weeks and was largely limited to mapping the site, f

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ine-tuning node positions and resolving one remaining deadlock. The project team estimated that commissioning could otherwise have taken twice as long or more, as traffic issues would have needed to be identified, redesigned and retested on site. Eighteen months later, the system remained in operation with vehicle uptime above 99 percent. In our case, we can transfer the project developed in simulation to the product

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e vehicles and their behaviour exactly, with our fleet management software operating just as it would in the live installation. The fleet manager responds to the simulated vehicles the same way as it would physical ones, giving the project team a much closer representation of how the complete system will behave, typically with more than 95 percent accuracy against the real installation. No simulation can reproduce ev

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