Feasibility Study and Simulation-Based Assessment of a Proposed AMR System for Finished Goods Pickup in an Electrotechnical Enterprise

This study evaluates the operational potential of modernizing intraplant material flow by integrating an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) with lean logistics principles at Schneider Electric Elda SA. The baseline manual transport system was diagnosed through a quantitative red-green waste assessment, revealing capacity constraints, non-value-adding activities, and traffic congestion. To address these inefficiencies, an AMR-assisted transport architecture was developed by decoupling finished goods transport from component delivery. The proposed system was evaluated through a non-deterministic discrete-event simulation model in FlexSim, incorporating structural sensitivity analysis and stochastic Pareto-governed handling overheads. The findings suggest that a single AMR is capable of executing a simulated 24 transport operations per shift compared to the 21 pallets observed in the baseline setup while maintaining a theoretical operational reserve of 41%. However, stress-testing reveals that a 20% production surge or heavy-tailed operational disturbances compress this buffer to 26.0% and 37.5%, respectively, triggering localized average waiting times at line D13 of up to 36.0 min. As an exploratory examination of the design behavior, the limitations of a single vehicle operating without localized safety zones or ambient traffic interference under these specific structural strains are exposed. By combining Lean logistics principles with unit modeling and sensitivity analysis, the study generates scalable data and detailing completed transport and waiting times across specific scenarios, highlighting the critical limits of the simplified single-vehicle simulation.