Automating the development of agent-based warehouse control systems

Abstract

Warehouses play a critical role in supply chains: they are responsible for the distribution of goods of many suppliers to many customers. Because of increasing customer demands, warehouse processes are becoming too complex to be controlled optimally by their traditional centralised control systems. Several results in the literature show that decentralised controllers are a viable alternative. Unfortunately, the development of effective decentralised warehouse controllers is quite complex, as one has to design the desired system behaviour from the behaviours of its components. This paper proposes a generic architecture that supports the design of agent-based warehouse controllers. This architecture is based on two types of generic components having behaviours with business rule plug-ins. This paper describes the new architecture and how it can be used to automate the development of warehouse control systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.