An Autonomous Control Concept for Production Logistics

The German Collaborative Research Centre 637 ‘Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes’ tries to make a paradigm shift from central planning to autonomous control in the field of logistics. Among other things, autonomous routing algorithms based on internet routing protocols are developed. The Distributed Logistics Routing Protocol (DLRP) was originally designed for transport networks to match goods and vehicles and to continuously make route decisions. Now the protocol was transferred to production logistics as a promising autonomous control method. The DLRP enables the abilities for logistic objects, orders and machines, to make own decisions with the information actually and locally available. In contrast to common scheduling algorithms, the DLRP is not a planning, but a control method with the capability for multiple, user defined optimization goals. The new autonomous control concept for production logistics will be presented in this paper and a first evaluation with common scheduling heuristics will be given.