Coordinated Conveying
Shivakumar Sastry · 2019
This paper presents a well-structured, mixed-criticality, system that exhibits rich spatio-temporal behaviors that arise from the interactions of mobile conveying units. The system-level objective is for the collection of decentralized, autonomous, mobile units to transport entities from some input port to an output port when each entity has its own destination, deadline and Quality of Service constraints. Entities move by riding on the mobile units and transfer from one unit to another when two units rendezvous. We propose a systematic approach to transform the spatio-temporal patterns of interactions to a graph from which we can obtain the shortest paths that can help to address the system objective. In the future, such systems can be used to investigate a variety of intelligent, embedded, mechatronic systems issues. This system can also be integrated with other models for processes and systems to investigate some of the challenges envisaged in Industry 4.0.