Distributed Software Architecture for Type-Specific AGV Routing

The current trend towards mass customization confronts established mass production systems with specific challenges, as these are designed for the production of large quantities with a small number of variants. Future production layouts will have to provide a high degree of flexibility and changeability in order to be able to respond to the demand for individualized mass products. This leads to a production network in which the work schedule of each product and thus the sequence of the individual production resources are flexibly arranged without losing the cost advantages of mass production. The current design forms, as a monolithic AGV system or the use of flexible autonomous units, show specific weaknesses that limit the use of these solutions in a flexible production network. The paper describes the research approach to establish an intralogistics service-based software architecture as an intralogistics execution system, which contains the elementary functions of a cross-platform use of mobile autonomous systems. One key application is the implementation of typespecific routes, which enables the cross-platform digitalization of the workspace to improve the interoperability and efficiency in route and path planning of different transport solution within one scenario. The implementation of the approach shows the advantages of a cross-platform service structure in general and the routing service in particular.