A Digital Platform for Heterogeneous Fleet Management in Manufacturing Intralogistics

Brainport Industries Campus (BIC) is a unique initiative taken by the high-tech suppliers of the Eindhoven region to come together and work towards collaborative consumption of shared resources such as production machines, automated guided vehicles, clean rooms, and storage spaces in order to jointly meet their customers’ demands, reduce cost of ownership, and better manage risks during uncertain demand and supply cycles. However, the matching-demand-with-supply process in a sharing economy requires novel perspectives and tools. In this chapter, we propose a digital platform for serving multiple tenants of BIC, sharing a fleet of heterogeneous automated guided vehicles (AGVs). The proposed platform includes a user interface as an order input system, an order database, and a central cloud server that houses the necessary intelligence for communicating with all the aforementioned modules. This platform that serves multiple tenants sharing a heterogeneous AGV fleet is the first of its kind.