An Autonomous Cooperative System for Material Handling Applications

The key to the creation of flexible automation is to use inherent redundancy in the capabilities of the system being controlled. This requires the control system to be continuously selfconfigurable under varying conditions. The ability of the control system to react to and predict changes will ultimately determine the economic viability of that system. In this paper, an Autonomous Cooperative System to control material handling systems is presented. Important components of the material handling system are combined with intelligence and autonomy rules to flexibly control the operations of the physical equipment. Control is carried out while the overall operation of the system is optimized through cooperation among the controlled sections. The operation of the material handling system is observed during conditions of equipment and product changes. The results from simulation show how an Autonomous Cooperative System can be used to reduce the impact of changes in material handling applications.