Outcomes, Insights, and Best Practices from IIC Testbeds: Track & Trace Testbed
Wi-Fi translation, etc. An API provides either a 2-D or 3-D space and, at the end of the day, it reads a position. Users want to be able to bring this positioning to the enterprise software side of things. Moving up the standards stack, it gets a bit more specific. So, the testbed team has tried to identify the general purpose functions of the mobile asset. They discovered there are certain things such as battery load or status on / off which can be generalized.
The team discovered the interface for tightening tools can be generalized because in a tightening curve with torque and angle, it looks the same, whether looking at a Bosch export tool, an Atlas Copco ® tool or another. But the tightening functionality is very different from drilling, welding or riveting types of functionalities. So, they began developing sets of interfaces which are more generic, and the same applies to forklifts. There are certain generic characteristics of a forklift, such as load – loading and unloading it. Then there are different classes of forklifts – i. e., electric, gas-powered, hand-powered.
There are many localization technologies but the testbed team could not find a single localization technology that would cover all of their requirements because there is indoor and outdoor localization technology. There is high precision localization technology that only covers a very small range. As examples, it provides precision down to the millimeter, but only within the parameter of two meters. And there is other localization technology that allows one to cover an entire factory hall, but that only provides precision of up to between five and ten meters.
The testbed needed a generalization that allowed the team to plug in different types of localization technology depending on the use case. In some cases, they needed to combine different localization technology, such as combining ultra-wide band localization technology with inertial technology for places where the sensor would not reach because of a production environment. The environments present many metals, shields, and other materials that make any kind of localization very tricky. Striking the right balance between the cost to establish this implementation and managing it within a manufacturing environment, whether indoor or outdoor, was required. Precision was one element requiring experimentation, finding different combinations for different use cases.
In addition, the team needed to explore which interfaces in existing enterprise implementations could be leveraged – what new functionality must be built and how it can be connected to the Track and Trace sensors. For example, the forklifts needed to integrate with SAP Warehouse Management. But also required was something that sits in the middle, taking the data from the warehouse management systems, collecting the information about movements and matching this information. This is where the combination of a Boschbased solution and SAP Vehicle Insight was introduced in the forklift tracking.
There are a number of localization technologies available, but experimentation was required to determine which ones could be used for certain application areas and then decide how to integrate those through the technology stack. The team also had to
IIC Journal of Innovation 43