Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
only difference is the transport capacity: While worker-agents may
only carry light articles, forklift-agents may also carry heavy articles.
Micro-level: Warehouse manager
The third agent type, the warehouse manager, is responsible for dis-
tributing tasks to workers and forklifts. It has knowledge about all
articles (incoming, outgoing, stored) and all agents (persons and fork-
lifts) as well as of currently open orders which need to be fulfilled.
Based on these information, the warehouse manager creates appro-
priate Transport-Commands and sends them to workers and forklifts.
The warehouse manager agent has the following knowledge:
Inventory = storage location
×
(article
|
free
)
×
(
available
|
re-
served
)
The inventory contains all information about articles currently
stored in the warehouse. Free storage locations are available, i. e.,
articles may be put onto them, as long as they are not reserved for
any articles. After ordering a worker or forklift to bring an article
to a storage location, this storage location is reserved and is no
longer available.
List of current orders = platform
→
order
The list of current orders contains all orders which are processed at
this moment. To process an order, a platform has to be available.
Once an order has been assigned to a platform, this platform is
busy
until the order is completely fulfilled.
List of open orders = order*
The list of open orders contains all orders which have to be processed
in future. By default, the warehouse manager agent follows a simple
FIFO-strategy, i. e., orders are processed in order of their arrival.
List of fulfilled orders = order*
The list of fulfilled orders contains all orders which have been
fulfilled until the current point in time.
