SOFTWARE-IN-THE-LOOP TEST BENCH FOR THE EVALUATION OF THE COORDINATIVE FLEET CONTROL APPROACH IN INTRALOGISTICS

A system coordinator for the intelligent forwarding of transport orders enables the combination of several fleets of intralogistic transport vehicles such as robots in one material flow system without them having to exchange information with each other. Evaluating the operation of this coordinator requires a simulation environment that represents all adjacent systems, creating a Software-in-the-Loop (SiL) environment. This includes upstream systems, e.g. enterprise resource planning or manufacturing execution systems, several fleet controllers as well as a material flow system with all vehicles including their interactions and possible failures. In this article, the conceptual design of such an SiL system is presented. Additionally, a proof-of-concept shows the fundamental functionality by comparing the perfomance of two different configurations of the system coordinator. While the results are plausible relative to each other, an improvement of the system configuration is needed for the absolute validity of the values. Python is used for the system coordinator and the analysis, openTCS for the fleet controllers and Tecnomatix Plant Simulation for the material flow simulation. The communication in between uses HTTP and raw TCP packets, respectively.