Methods for analysis of the time aspect in the behavior of agent based material flow controls

The novel material flow control concepts like Internet of Things combine the up-to-date auto-identification methods with the modern software technologies. The expected control systems exhibit distributed scalable and flexible structures of stand-alone control entities. The price for these advantages is a non-deterministic time behavior of the local controls. The present study is devoted to the analysis of decentralized material flow controls under time constraints. The study results in a new approach to deal with deterministic and non-deterministic time factors. The paper introduces the Real-Time Logistics Model for identification, description and unification of time factors in conveyor systems and their controls. The model is integrated in and used with self-developed emulation software. The interplay of the model, the emulator and the agent-based control is shown in a real world example.