Vertical carousel automation

Hi guys, this is my first post in this (or any other forum) ever, i hope anyone can help me

For my graduation internship i have to redesign the software of a vertical carousel.

The company had a vertical carousel that broke down a few years ago, they replaced the controller with an “allen Bradley” PLC (logix1756-L63 with loxic1756-A17 chassis) to make it work again.

The vertical carousel is used as a stock for small parts like screws, bolts, heatschriks, plugs, etc.

1 of the demands from the company is make a automatic storage system that track the amount of parts remaining of a product in the vertical carousel.

I am pretty sure that a PLC is not the best way to make a inventory storage system but i don’t know any other industrial components to control a machine with. As said above i know some basics of arduino, but ofcourse that is not an option here.

Question: Is there a component other than a PLC that is more capable of running heavy programs like this storage unit (like an arduino but then more industrial)?

I study Mechatronics and I have some knowledge about PLC programming and programming in general (python and aduino basics) and i thought that this storage system would be perfect to program Object Oriented. I have no experience in OOP though.

Question: Is it possible to make a storage system within a PLC and what is the best way to do it? Question: Is it possible to program a PLC Object oriented and it usefull? (i have read that you can use FBD to program object oriented in a PLC but i want to know if there is another (better) way.)

To know how much parts are remaining in the vertical carousel i’d need to know all the amounts of each product. At first i want to keep track of the amounts manually, but if you take some parts without telling the HMI there would be a difference in actual amounts and amounts that the PLC think it has. So it might be usefull to measure the amount of pieces remaining. The first way that i can think if is to measure the weight of each product and calculate the amount with that weight.

Question: is there another way of measuring the amount of products remaining other than measuring weight?

Thanks in advance,

If there are any questions regarding the assignment or anything else, feel free to respond.

Best regards,

Theo