Deploying microservices for a cloud-based design of system-of-systems in intralogistics

For the realization of flexible, reconfigurable manufacturing and logistics facilities, heterogeneous, autonomous, and interconnected intralogistics systems are being deployed on the shop-floor. However, the distributed and often emerging nature of such systems makes their design and integration into existing processes a rather complex engineering task that requires a lot of coordination from all stakeholders. Modern IT tools offer solutions, but often target only individual system aspects such as modeling and simulation and rarely address the continuous evolution and changing requirements of such intralogistics systems. In this work, we approach distributed intralogistics systems as a system of systems and present a cloud-based engineering design process using microservices. In order to enable distributed simulation and testing of intralogistics systems, we employ a service-oriented architecture at systems' model-level, to couple simulation engines through a cloud-based platform. The applicability of the concept is demonstrated by a case study using a Discrete Event System Specification simulation framework, presenting system configuration and interface specification at run-time.