Cloud Computing for Autonomous Control in Logistics

Logistics processes in a globalised economy are increasingly complex, dynamic, and distributed. These properties pose major challenges for logistics planning and control. Conventional centralised approaches are frequently limited in their efficiency due to the high number of logistics objects and parameters to be considered. As an alternative, the paradigm of autonomous control in logistics delegates decisionmaking to the participating logistics objects themselves. This allows for decreasing the computational effort and coping with dynamics locally. Implementing autonomous logistics with intelligent software agents makes logistics control flexible and scalable with respect to transient demands. In order to meet customer demands, however, also the underlying hardware platform must be scalable. To this end, this paper examines cloud computing as a hardware platform abstraction for autonomous logistics. It discusses and compares different approaches how cloud computing can facilitate logistics control with intelligent software agents.