Autor: Steffen Sowade

Several internal and external factors influence the performance of manufacturing systems. They increase the requirements for the logistic system’s flexibility, robustness and adaptability. Changeable manufacturing and autonomous control of logistic processes are capable to cope with the complexity and dynamic induced by these factors. Using a case study of an apparel manufacturing company, this article explains how autonomous control can be used to enable changeable manufacturing. It describes five enablers for changeability for the control system solution presented in the case study.

Logistics has seen the introduction of autonomous control strategies and their abilities - as far as performance and robustness are concerned - have been proven. This article presents a procedure model, which helps to guide the design process for autonomous control strategies in logistics.

The Autonomous Logistic Engineering Methodology (ALEM), which is developed within the Collaborative Research Center 637, provides several tools for creating models of autonomously controlled logistic systems. To evaluate such models, the ALEM framework is extended to include a simulation component. As the ALEM Models cannot run directly within simulation software, they are transformed using principles of the Model Driven Architecture. To enable the transformation several open source tools can be applied. This article evaluates a selection of such tools with the aim of integrating them into ALEM.