Components and Names

The software was written in German, so I’m going to explain the abbreviations first, because they are used in the code and database names.

Transport Units

It’s all about Transport Units, called LE’s (Ladeeinheiten/Loadunits). We don’t use any inventories, but for picking you have to imagine there is some inventory on each LE. Transport Units move in and between Areas depending on their target.

Areas

The whole site consists of different Areas, called Ft’s (‘FörderTechnik’).

The central type of an Area is the conveyor belt (Fördertechnik), but there are also storage areas and picking areas.

Each Area tries to move its Transport Units. As they do it independently, each Ft (Area) runs in it’s own thread.

Locations

Each Area consists of a sequence of Locations, called Lf’s (Lagerfächer). Each Location can hold one Transport Unit (LE) and so each LE is moving from one Location to the next one.

Workstation

The picking area is very similar to a conveyor belt, but it has one Location of type Workstation (Ws). This is the location where the picking happens. On our visualization a little dialog pops up or receives the focus as soon as a LE arrives. In a real warehouse the Workstation might be a PC. To move the LE further on (after imaginary inventory has been picked) a dialog has to be used. Furthermore the Workstation dialog allows to create new LE’s.

Orders

Additionally it is possible to supply Orders. Each Order (Task Order) is dynamically assigned to one Workstation and consists of one or more Tasks. A Task basically consists of a LE, which has to be ‘picked’ at a Workstation. Before a Task can route a LE to a Workstation, that LE has to be in a storage area. The Taskorder itself starts if there is a free workstation and all LE’s are available.