An automated warehouse or automated warehouse consists of automating all or most of the tasks carried out within a warehouse, which is a physical space for the storage of goods within the supply chain.[1]​.

It is a storage system specially designed for logistics solutions that allow maximizing productivity ratios, reducing the necessary space and the number of movements.

Said storage can be adapted to different environments, depending on the sector and activity of the warehouse, and the facilities can be adapted to, for example, cold and/or frozen environments.

From a strict point of view, an automatic warehouse could only be considered one in which the products are not handled by any person from the entry dock to the exit dock. This definition today would lead us to be able to consider automatic warehouses only as lung warehouses, that is, those warehouses where the references enter and leave in the same packaging unit, without any picking operation on the references, that is, those warehouses where there is no process of breaking the packaging for the references oriented to the extraction of part of the quantity of a reference stored in a specific position. That is why this name is also accepted for those warehouses where the stowage and extraction process is carried out by automated machinery.[2]​.

Depending on the characteristics of each warehouse, automatic storage can be composed of:.

The warehouse computer system (be it a factory or a logistics center) has software that controls all the movements of pallets or merchandise that are carried out in the center, taking into account movements that are carried out between different warehouses in the center, goods that have to be sent to the shipping section, goods to the picking departments, receipts of goods that have to be stored, supply of materials to the assembly lines, removal of finished products from the chains destined for storage, etc. and it calculates which movements are the highest priority and gives the orders to all the handlers (including stacker cranes) that exist in the warehouse so that each merchandise reaches its destination.[3]​.

All pallets or storage units have a sticker with a barcode (or other system) incorporated and through readers, the system has identified all the pallets in the center, the stock and knows in which position on the shelf each one is located, being able to guarantee perfect traceability of all the merchandise or even when making shipments, remove the products with the latest expiration date.[4]​.