Towards a Plug and Play Architecture for a Materialflow Handling System

The automated intra logistic systems on the market nowadays consist most commonly of a fleet of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) from one vendor specifically configured for one well defined and very structured operation environment. This might lead to a vendor lock causing a costly reconfiguration and limited scalability. In this paper we focus on a novel approach aimed at a plug and play integration of heterogeneous AGVs into a materialflow handling system to support a highly heterogeneous fleet of AGVs. The automatic registration process makes a new AGV a part of the system, ready to get tasks assigned. Through the plug and play capability, it is possible to increase the overall logistics capacity by adding AGVs to an already operating fleet. We propose a solution based on the FIWARE platform to extend a manufacturing execution system and to provide a highly configurable materialflow handling. This paper also proposes a strategy of monitoring an application without a dedicated heartbeat by reusing a data packet.