Modelling and Analysis of Autonomous Shop Floor Control

To manage the increasing dynamics inside and outside a production system, a decentralised and autonomous control of shop floor logistics is a promising approach. For developing and benchmarking such autonomous control methods, dynamic models are essential. The paper introduces the idea of autonomous logistic processes and presents a dynamic simulation model of a shop floor with both a conventionally planned and an autonomously controlled scenario. The decentralised and autonomous control strategy bases on autonomous elements that are able to make decisions by themselves using distributed local information. The simulation model is used for analysing the system’s dynamics at varying workloads. The logistic performance is analysed by comparing throughput times for the different logistics situations and during expected and unexpected disturbances.