Mobile materials handling platform interface architecture for mass production environments

Abstract

Industrial manufacturing systems achieve production stability due to near constant production processes e.g. mass production. Passive methods such as production flow analysis can produce plant layouts which optimise material flow within the processing environment. Due to the operational structure of mass customisation, passive methods alone cannot facilitate customer influenced production dynamics. This is due to the fact that every product is different from the last. Active methods such as flexible materials handling systems can be used to achieve production stability in mass customisation production environments. This paper presents a mobile platform architecture that can act as an active stability component in customer influenced production environments. This architecture consists of many hierarchical levels of abstraction spanning from the physical domain up to the platform management.