Consafe Logistics Selects AdaCore?s GNAT Pro for Critical Warehouse Control System Firmware

December 10, 2020

Press Release

Consafe Logistics Selects AdaCore?s GNAT Pro for Critical Warehouse Control System Firmware

Enables stability, security and safety when controlling complex automated warehouse solutions.

NEW YORK, December 8, 2020 - AdaCore today announced that Consafe Logistics, the leading European supplier of warehouse management solutions, has deployed AdaCore’s GNAT Pro development environment for the Ada programming language to implement mission-critical firmware within its innovative Warehouse Control Systems (WCS). The selection of GNAT Pro Ada enables Consafe Logistics to meet stringent assurance requirements, helping ensure that its systems operate reliably, safely and securely at its customers’ large and complex warehouse sites.

Consafe Logistics solutions keep more than 500 warehouses in 30 countries running, delivering goods to millions of customers. Demonstrating their importance, one warehouse is the start or destination for 30% of all daily grocery traffic in Sweden, while another in Germany will cause tailbacks to the public highway if the system stops for just 25 minutes.

Consafe Logistics chose Ada for the high-assurance firmware within its WCS solution due to its high levels of reliability, security, maintainability and performance. Ada’s strong typing and other compile-time checks catch errors even before the code is run, and the language’s run-time checks will detect errors such as buffer overrun during testing, thereby helping to keep the fielded system free from vulnerabilities. Consafe Logistics adopted GNAT Pro, replacing an internally created solution, as it enables shorter development cycles, provides confidence that code will work correctly when compiled and is backed by comprehensive support provided by AdaCore’s GNAT Pro developers themselves. Maintenance and change management is easier, meaning Consafe Logistics requires a small Ada development team even though its solution consists of millions of lines of code and handles very complex automation equipment and warehouses.

“We are always evolving our products to meet new requirements on the market and to leverage new technologies, to constantly help our customers to develop their business. At the same time, we need to keep the existing mission critical functionality running flawlessly 24x7x365 at customer sites,” said Andreas Anyuru, CTO at Consafe Logistics. “Relying on Ada and the solutions from AdaCore for some of the firmware in our most complex automation solutions gives us the robustness needed in our Warehouse Control System solution.”

“In an increasingly digital world, businesses need to guarantee the highest levels of reliability and security in their software,” said Jamie Ayre, Commercial Director, AdaCore. “As the experience of Consafe Logistics demonstrates, the combination of Ada and GNAT Pro provides the ability to innovate quickly and maintain safety and security properties within critical software solutions which are relied on by major warehouses around the world.”

About Consafe Logistics

Consafe Logistics is the leading European supplier of warehouse management solutions. We deliver reliable, flexible and smart solutions to create competitive advantages for our customers worldwide.

With our extensive warehouse knowledge and through co-creation, we deliver sustainable solutions that fit every level of complexity and volume in the warehouse. Being technically curious and determined to create efficiency for our customers, we drive world-class software development to give you a competitive edge. We have been doing it since 1978.

The Consafe Logistics Group consists of 400 employees and supports our global clients from our subsidiaries in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Holland, Poland and the UK. HQ is located in Lund, Sweden.

About AdaCore

Founded in 1994, AdaCore supplies software development and verification tools for mission-critical, safety-critical and security-critical systems. Four flagship products highlight the company’s offerings:

  • The GNAT Pro development environment, a complete toolset for designing, implementing, and managing applications that demand high reliability and maintainability. GNAT Pro is available for Ada and also for C and C++.
  • The CWE-Compatible CodePeer advanced static analysis tool, an automatic Ada code reviewer and validator that can detect and eliminate errors both during development and retrospectively on existing software. CodePeer can detect a number of the “Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors” in the MITRE Corporation’s Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE).
  • The SPARK Pro verification environment, a toolset providing full formal verification oriented toward high-assurance systems with stringent security requirements.
  • The QGen model-based development tool suite for safety-critical control systems, providing a qualifiable and customizable code generator and static verifier for a safe subset of Simulink® and Stateflow® models, and a model-level debugger.

Over the years customers have used AdaCore products to field and maintain a wide range of critical applications in domains such as commercial and military avionics, automotive, railway, space, defense systems, air traffic management/control, 

medical devices, and financial services. AdaCore has an extensive and growing worldwide customer base; see www.adacore.com/industries for further information.

AdaCore products are open source and come with expert online support provided by the developers themselves. The company has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com.