Eureka! Institutional Repository

The Internet of Things is rapidly shaping the industrial era through innovative services, state of art equipment and the appropriate software. The social media's wide acceptance, enabled us to get familiar with the data and information use and innovative services, while cloud computing provided companies and individuals the ability to use low-powered and of large range specialized wireless services for simultaneous support of thousands devices and massive use of open hardware architectures for low cost processors. At this complex environment, there is a tendency by industry to provide high differentiation products to consumers, which presupposes flexible production structures that immediately adjust to new challenges. The fourth Industrial Revolution phase (Industry 4.0) redefines the alignment of supply and demand, available stocks, customer service time, services quality, raw material consumption and product processing, use and maintenance of production machinery. On supply chain level there is a direct interaction among customers, retailers, whole salers and raw material suppliers in order to build a demand driven supply chain network. In this thesis, the creation of a dynamic industrial environment, capable of adjusting to demand challenges, was studied. Industrial entities are dynamically inserted into the system and declare their presence, while they offer their services at the central service directory. Entities operate as autonomous agents, communicating with each other through the developed protocols. Transportations between the points of interest are carried out, by many intelligent autonomous vehicles, while on the same time they discover the shortest path in a distributed operating framework. From the supply chain perspective, the application is focused on the warehouse management level, but it can be extended to production level, with the addition of the required entities. The user creates the facility layout, inserts the individual entities and awaits the upcoming demand in order to dynamically transport the product. Loads can be dynamically located at the facility layout, and place a movement request, using agent based communication protocols. The transportation protocol can use multiple rules (shortest distance from the loads, longer vehicle waiting time etc.) while the A * (a star) algorithm ensures the shortest distance selection. The software allows the monitoring and control of the system at real-time.