ZAFH Intralogistik

The first phase 2017 - 2020 initially focused on consolidating the contributions to the key topics of the project that had previously been made independently by the participating UASs. With ZAFH Intralogistik, these contributions were merged and realigned under the guideline "collaborative systems to make intralogistics more flexible". Through close collaboration and methodological addition to the extensive addressing of a promising area of application, the UASs involved achieved the necessary critical mass and the framework for cooperation across different faculties and different locations.  

Associated partners were also integrated into the project during the course of the project. They came from both the user sector (e.g. pharmaceutical logistics, freight forwarding) and from the technology sector (e.g., control and automation technology, gripping systems and clamping technology for robots and production machinery). The partners from the user sector ensured that the logistics processes to be developed meet industrial requirements and follow realistic indicators. The technology partners in turn ensured that the hardware and software technologies used and further developed could be used industrially with the appropriate interfaces. At the end of the first funding phase, a fully integrated overall scenario (digital/physical) was developed and implemented at Werk150 and then demonstrated to visitors from industry, research and education. There the essential developments of the first funding period were formulated to create a modular system kit consisting of services, tools and components.

The second funding phase of the project began in July 2020 with the aim of deepening, consolidating, expanding and further disseminating the results of the first phase. At the beginning of the second phase, the aim was to develop diverse representative reference scenarios and demonstrate their technological and methodological support with the ZAFH Intralogistik modular system kit. In the course of this, the capabilities of service robots, the digitisation intralogistics processes (i.e. modelling, execution, monitoring and adaptation of appropriate workflows) and scenario evaluation were made available and accessible to end users by means of role-specific tools.

The overall aim was to make service robotics applications in intralogistics transparent for potential users and to employ the acquired competence to increase agility for investment decisions for the use of robotics in logistics processes. As a specific project result, alternative process configurations have been implemented in the reference scenarios (so-called process variants) which make the digitally supported intralogistics transport and order picking scenarios flexible and adaptable.

In the further course of the second project phase, these partial scenarios were consolidated into a complex, integrated overall scenario (physical and digital) with differentiated characteristics or partial aspects of industrial requirements and technology levels and implemented in Werk150. All the participating working groups from Ulm University, Ulm University of Applied Sciences and Reutlingen University were involved in this complex, integrated overall scenario with their central development work within the framework of ZAFH Intralogistik in order to finally test and validate it. A summary of the main results of this complex, integrated overall scenario can be viewed in the following video.