ENABLING IMPROVED PROCESS CONTROL OPPORTUNITIES BY MEANS OF LOGISTICS CONTROL TOWERS AND VISION-BASED MONITORING

摘要

Due to the lack of integration of existing IT solutions between the planning level and the execution level, many enterprises in the logistics sector are not able to achieve optimal process executions, particularly in cases of deviations and exceptions. Despite a greater supply of sensor devices over the past years, a wider spread of sensor devices has not yet taken place because the required information are either unavailable, unreliable or badly remunerative. Thereby, process control and deviation management often ends in mere troubleshooting rather than in searching for the optima in an organized manner. By adopting control towers at the interface between the two concerned levels and using low-cost cameras and image processing algorithms for the detection of objects, such lack of trust in the yielded information can be overcome. Such a vision-based monitoring tool is capable of supporting functions which are useful for the decision-making process on executional level. In the present paper, the different information which are provided by a vision-based monitoring tool are presented, followed by three application examples which show the different functionalities provided and the potential disclosed by the tool.