An Auction-based Approach to Control Automated Warehouses using Smart Vehicles

In the field of logistics, the study of systems that follow the recommended requirements of the ``Industry 4.0'' is now of paramount importance. Since traditional hierarchical and centralized control architectures have been employed to solve most of the basic problems in this context, many researchers have shifted their focus to the study of more flexible ones. This is mainly due to the fact that nowadays vehicles are able to work on their own and interact with each other exchanging messages. In the studied application domain, the main contribution of this thesis concerns the development of an auction-based control architecture for the control of modern AWSs focusing the efforts on the mission assignment problem. To face with the problem of the system performance evaluation and analysis and to support the development of auction-based control algorithms, a highly modular and compact hybrid model based on PNs together with heuristic based control laws was designed. In addition, an automated model synthesis procedure was also developed, since the manual creation of the provided model can be a very demanding activity. To remedy the lack of design methods, that is still a problem for algorithms based on auction mechanisms, a design methodology for such algorithms is also devised: results to the problem of design/tuning appropriately the proposed auction-based control algorithm are also presented. Simulation results encourage the adoption of auction-based control architectures in logistic environments as effective and efficient solutions. At the same time, modularity, real-time capabilities, robustness, services orientation capabilities and scalability are delivered to the whole system. [edited by Author]