Gerben G. Meyer

Intelligent Products: A survey

This paper presents an overview of the field of Intelligent Products. As Intelligent Products have many facets, this paper is mainly focused on the concept behind Intelligent Products, the technical foundations, and the achievable practical goals of Intelligent Products. A novel classification of Intelligent Products is introduced, which distinguishes between three orthogonal dimensions. Furthermore, the technical foundations in the areas of automatic identification and embedded processing, distributed information storage and processing, and agent-based systems are discussed, as well as the achievable practical goals in the contexts of manufacturing, supply chains, asset management, and product life cycle management.

Production monitoring and control with intelligent products

Advances in production planning and control in recent decades have focused on increasing the sophistication of the planning function. For good reasons, these advances have led to the centralisation of the planning function in production. However, the sophistication of the planning function should be in balance with monitoring and control of the plan. Monitoring and control are by their nature decentralised, beginning on the shop floor, and, therefore, the desire for greater sophistication in monitoring and control leads to renewed interest in decentralised and localised approaches. This paper demonstrates the possibility of using intelligent products for decentralised monitoring and control. Intelligent products are aware of their local context and can negotiate with local manufacturing resources. As such, local solutions to problems can be proposed directly when problems occur. With the advancement of the ‘Internet of Things’, such a scenario is likely to become feasible in the near future. The paper demonstrates the viability of such an approach through a simulation study, in which robustness is included as an additional measure of performance. The results of the simulations are encouraging.

Intelligent products for enhancing the utilization of tracking technology in transportation

Purpose – Many transportation companies struggle to effectively utilize the information provided by tracking technology for performing operational control. The research as presented in this paper aims to identify the problems underlying the inability to utilize tracking technology within this context. Moreover, this paper aims to contribute to solving these problems by proposing a set of design principles based on the concept of intelligent products. Design/methodology/approach – The study as described in this paper adopts a design science research methodology consisting of three phases. First, a case study in a transportation company has been performed to identify the problems faced when utilizing tracking technology. Second, to overcome these problems, a set of design principles has been formulated. Finally, a prototype system based on the design principles has been developed and subjected to experimental and observational evaluation. Findings – This paper identifies the problems associated with the uti...

Agent Interaction Modeling Based on Product-Centric Data: A Formal Method to Improve Enterprise Interoperability

This paper shows how companies can use product-centric data to locally represent the interactions with and between their partners. An agent-based interaction modeling language is used to capture these interactions graphically and formally. Moreover, a formal method is introduced that enables partners to automatically construct a global interaction diagram from their local interaction representations. This global interaction diagram improves enterprise interoperability, since it increases overall process visibility. A simple process example is used to illustrate the approach.

Intelligent Products for Monitoring and Control of Road-Based Logistics

This paper presents a new architecture of an intelligent information system for monitoring and control of road-based logistics. The typical business of road-based logistic companies is to transport goods from a certain source to a certain destination by the use of trucks. During the actual transportation of goods, small disturbances such as delays or wrongly loaded goods can prevent the original plan from being executed as intended. Some of the main problems caused by these disturbances, and how they are currently dealt with, are investigated in a medium-sized logistics company. Typically, traditional planning and control systems have difficulties handling these kinds of problems effectively. However, recent technological developments, such as intelligent products, enable new solutions in the field of information systems. Therefore, a new system architecture is proposed here to tackle the outlined problems. The system is designed to detect local disturbances in real-time, and solutions to problems caused by these disturbances can be presented to the users directly. This approach is validated through an evaluation method based on real-life descriptive scenarios.

Robust Planning and Control Using Intelligent Products

The advances in production planning and control in the last decades have confirmed the centralized nature of the planning function. However, centralization has disadvantages when quick response to local production problems is required. Therefore, renewed interest in decentralized approaches emerges. This paper investigates the possibility to use intelligent products for decentralized handling of disturbances. Intelligent products are aware of their local context and they can negotiate with local manufacturing resources. Therefore, local solutions for problems can be suggested, virtually at the same time at which the problem occurs. The paper demonstrates the viability of this approach via a simulation study. For reasons of comparison, the TAC SCM environment is used. Moreover, robustness is taken as an additional measurement of performance. The results of the simulations are encouraging.

Smart Objects System: A Generic System for Enhancing Operational Control

Many companies are making considerable investments in tracking technology, such as GPS and RFID. Although tracking technology captures vast amounts of information about the ongoing operations, companies struggle to effectively apply this captured information for enhancing their operational control. In order to contribute in solving this problem, this paper presents a generic system for enhancing operational control, which applies the captured information in a more effective way. The proposed system is based on the approach of intelligent products. The intelligent products represent physical objects, and are capable of autonomously performing some of the repetitive tasks required for operational control. The usefulness of the system is demonstrated by presenting the results of several applications of the system.

Agent Behavior Alignment: A Mechanism to Overcome Problems in Agent Interactions During Runtime

When two or more agents interacting, their behaviors are not necessarily matching. Automated ways to overcome conflicts in the behavior of agents can make the execution of interactions more reliable. Such an alignment mechanism will reduce the necessary human intervention. This paper shows how to describe a policy for alignment, which an agent can apply when its behavior is in conflict with other agents. An extension of Petri Nets is used to capture the intended interaction of an agent in a formal way. Furthermore, a mechanism based on machine learning is implemented, to enable an agent to choose an appropriate alignment policy with collected problem information. Human intervention can reinforce certain successful policies in a given context, and can also contribute by adding completely new policies. Experiments have been conducted to test the applicability of the alignment mechanism and the main results are presented here.

Simulation and evaluation of charging control systems for electric vehicle car parks

In the near future, more and more vehicles will be driven by electricity instead of fossil fuels. Consequently, these electric vehicles need charging, for example when parked in car parks. Charging many electric vehicles simultaneously in a car park leads to various problems which need to be tackled. This is mainly due to the limited power availability, caused by the limited capacity of the conductors and transformers in place. Moreover, every vehicle has different charging requirements, due to the variety in parking time and driving distance after parking. Because of these reasons, every car park will need a system which controls the charging of electric vehicles, and determines which vehicles are charged at what time. In order to evaluate different charging control systems for car parks, a simulation environment is proposed in this paper. The proposed simulation environment is based on the Smart Objects System, and enables the simulation and evaluation of various charging control systems for car parks. Initial simulations performed with the proposed simulation environment show promising results.

Situation Awareness for Improved Operational Control in Cross Docks: An Illustrative Case Study

This paper presents research in progress aimed at developing a conceptual framework for operational control at cross docks. The proposed framework contributes to cross docking literature by including situation awareness as an important concept of operational control. The implications of the proposed conceptual framework are explored in an illustrative case study. That case study reveals that despite the availability of real-time and detailed information about the on-going operations, the ability to perform operational control is hampered by a lack of situation awareness. Therefore, this paper intends to start a debate about situation awareness in the academic cross docking community. This debate should focus on how to exploit the available information for providing the decision makers with the situation awareness necessary to perform effective operational control.