Understanding Autonomous Cooperation and Control in Logistics: The Impact of Autonomy on Management, Information, Communication and Material Flow

One of the great challenges in flexible production and supply chains is the availability of necessary information at any time and any place. As a result of increasing dynamical and structural complexity of structures and processes in production it is often impossible to make all necessary information available to a central instance in real time and to perform appropriate measures of control in terms of a defined target system. A fast and flexible adaptation to changing basic conditions ought to be achieved by establishing autonomous logistics processes.

In this context several fundamental questions concerning autonomous cooperating logistics processes were investigated:

The identification problem: What are autonomous logistics processes and how do they differ from conventionally managed processes?

The description problem: Which changes will autonomy cause in order processing?

One of the first results is a definition for the term autonomy for applications in engineering science. The constituent characteristics of this definition were considered within the development of the catalogue of criteria in order to describe autonomous logistic processes. Regarding the modelling of autonomous processes, first requirements for modelling methods were specified. To validate the research results, a production-logistic shop-floor scenario and a practical scenario based on the real business processes of an automobile terminal were developed. Simulation studies concerning autonomously controlled allocation of parking areas document comprehensive opportunities for improvement.

Dr.-Ing. Katja Windt is leader of the sub-department "Intelligent Planning and Control Methods for Logistic Systems" within the Bremen Institute of Industrial Technology and Applied Work Sciences (BIBA) at the University of Bremen. She supervises one sub-project ("Process-Orientated Basic Studies for Autonomous Cooperation and Control") of the Collaborative Research Center named "Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes – A Paradigm Shift and its Limitations" which is supported by the German Research Foundation. In July 2004 she became member of die Junge Akademie (The Young Academie) in Germany and is elected as speaker of the plenum for a one year period in 2006/2007. In her research she focuses on planning and control methods for production and logistic systems.

Prof. Dr. Michael Hülsmann is head of the unit "Management of Sustainable System Development" and academic director of the SCOUT-Institute for Strategic Competence Management in the Faculty for Business Studies and Economics at the University of Bremen. Additionally, he is member of the board of the Collaborative Research Centre 637 "Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes - A Paradigm Shift and its Limitations", which is supported by the German Research Foundation. In his research he focuses on strategic management and organisation theory, especially for logistics.