Advanced management in a logistics platform equipped with automated handling means

A logistics platform represents a fundamental ring of the supply chain; it receives, stores and delivers goods trying to face the organizational problems of various type (economic, financial, technological, production, logistics, etc), experimenting with new organizational solutions aimed at making its production and logistics structure more efficiently. Its efficiency depends on many factors and is important because costs affect the production or distribution accounts and ultimately fall on the consumer (Gattuso et al., 2014a). In a context more and more addressed to the search for solutions able to increase productivity and pursue sustainability, the paper aims to improve the performance of Logistics platform, and therefore of the Supply Chain, by using freight advanced handling systems of the latest generation. After an analysis of the logistics platform standard asset and the related handling means used for the goods movement, the attention is focused on a smart organizational and functional structure (fleet management) with automated handling vehicles. The paper aims to evaluate the impacts in terms of time in a scenario of partial and total automation of a system using a simulation approach