Intralogistics Execution System mit integrierten autonomen, servicebasierten Transportentitäten

Description

The main research content of the dissertation is the realization of an intralogistics service layer, which allows an allocation of transport orders to individual entities as well as an order-specific route planning and autonomous path execution. Thus, the established process of internal material flow planning is substituted by a regulation in the planning as well as in the operation phase. One research focus is the conception of a layer model of the software of the transport vehicles, which aggregates the basic skills of the entities to main skills by a hybrid control paradigm and forms the basis of the decentralized order allocation. The second research topic addresses the service-oriented system architecture for digitizing the working environment, route planning and path execution. The third part of the research involves the integration of the intralogistics order allocation method into a discrete-event simulation, which enables a virtual image of the intralogistics during the planning and operation phase. These three research topics are based on a detailed investigation of the current system solutions for the distribution of transport orders to individual units of a material flow system, the digitization of the work area and the established procedures of system design in the planning and operation phase.

The results show that the elimination of a higher-level instance ensures that different transport systems with different strategies and properties can exist in a unified architecture. The transport order selects the most suitable transportation system without an explicit rule. Through this standardized communication and software architecture, the researched system is scalable both in the number of transport entities and in the vehicle types used, which in this form differs fundamentally from the known approaches of AGVs.

The central feature of the service-oriented architecture is that the algorithms for fulfilling the necessary individual tasks are outsourced to independent services. In addition, the system design follows the principle of reducing the data exchange between the individual instances to a minimum and always triggering it according to demand. The system also allows the location and number of physical units on which the algorithms are implemented to be freely selected. This makes the system infinitely scalable both in terms of area and the number of transport robots in use.