Cloud Material Handling Systems
Article from MHI Solutions Magazine
Efficient utilization of material handling equipment (MHE) significantly impacts the productivity, profitability and flexibility of production systems. For instance, machine performance could be impacted when a forklift driver is unavailable, or unit loads in the unloading station are still waiting to be transported to the next production phase. In modern production systems, cloud technologies are considered cutting-edge, with cloud manufacturing impacting the management of production through the ability to share real-time information about product status and all production services. While cloud technologies have been widely analyzed and discussed on a shop-floor level connecting machines, material handling systems have not received as much attention.
The typical structure of material handling systems is a combination of different equipment with varying levels of automation, including manual and mechanized systems where humans still play a critical decision-making role. Automated solutions like Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) or Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) for material transportation and various evolutions of Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (AS/RS) for material storage have been introduced in recent years, but these systems are characterized by central control architecture. Therefore, a multilevel hierarchical control system is required to coordinate the different subsystems and enable products to move efficiently within the production systems.
Recently, the availability of Industry 4.0 technologies such as indoor positioning technologies, Internet of Things, motion tracking and control and cloud computing make MHE a viable solution to increase productivity, profitability and flexibility of production systems.
In 2020, to extend the definition of cloud manufacturing to cover handling activities, researchers in the Logistics 4.0 Laboratory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have introduced and developed a new kind of paradigm called the Cloud Material Handling System (CMHS)…
