At the Multimodal Exhibition last month UKWA hosted a series of talks and panel discussions, all of which were well received, but perhaps the session provoking the most animated response was Designing the Warehouse of the Future, which I had the pleasure of chairing.
Our well-informed and engaging guests were Petrina Austin, Partner and Head of Asset Management at Tritax, Tim Ward, CEO at Chetwoods Architects, Harry Watts, MD at SEC Storage and Martyn Wherry, Commercial Director at Glamox Luxonic. I asked each of them to share changes they had identified in the operation of warehouses and to predict what changes might be ahead – both in the immediate future and in the much longer term, say fifty years from now.
Their responses made for a fascinating discussion. We talked about digital twins and the role of technology in developing ever better systems: more efficient, more sustainable and more profitable.
A digital twin is, as the name suggests, a virtual model of a physical object or system – in this case a warehouse operation – that can be used to simulate the response of that system to the introduction of any change and better understand how it works in real life. Essentially, as Richard Potter of Microsoft explained at our National Conference earlier this year, using digital twins de-risks change and drives innovation.
In our panel discussion, Harry Watts noted that digital twins minimise cost, while maximising efficiency. By gathering data and translating it from a theoretical model into a tangible, visually accessible form, sharable with a diverse, cross functional team, innovation is underpinned by collaboration.
For the future, we heard about his vision for intelligent buildings, able to run themselves based on data and digital twins, with decisions made by AI, and robotic eco-systems where robots interface and worked alongside one another.
We discussed warehouse buildings too. The shortage of land for urban logistics is well documented, and so Tim Ward predicted a rise in warehouses within residential developments, co-located with data centres, leisure facilities and other services, with linear connections and vertical stacking in multistorey buildings. Looking forward, Tim visualised an integrated subterranean network of logistics routes, with autonomous vehicles transporting goods between destinations. Chetwoods are already working on a such a scheme, he said.
Ultimately, we don’t really know what’s ahead in the long term, with so many factors in play. Our panelists agreed that technologies like 3D printing could change the nature of supply chains entirely, while Martyn was optimistic that lighting of some kind would continue to be required, although he said its energy efficiency could be unrecognisably good – after all even robots need light to scan barcodes. What looks likely is co-located, multi-storey, intelligent buildings that use digital twins and multiple data feeds from sensors across the warehouse to operate at optimum efficiency. You heard it here first!
Clare Bottle
UKWA, CEO
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