Design and simulation of a multimodal transport system consisting of FTF and UAV for a quasi-steady milkrun in an SME production environment

The material flow in a company accounts for up to 80% of production costs. One effective way to increase the efficiency of material flows is to use automated guided vehicles (AGVs) in a milk run. Typically, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have established layouts that are unsuitable for the introduction of AGV milk runs. Some sources or sinks cannot be served by the milk run, resulting in a significant economic disadvantage for SMEs in managing the intralogistics material flow.

A promising approach to counter the economic disadvantage of SMEs described above is multimodal transport systems consisting of AGVs and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The sources and sinks that cannot be served by the AGV milk run are flown to by UAVs. The MulTraSys research project is investigating this innovative concept.

The research project is based on the working hypothesis that logistics performance increases in companies with small and lightweight components – for example in the semiconductor industry – if multimodal transport systems consisting of AGVs and UAVs are used and the AGVs are used as a continuous milk run.In order to test this working hypothesis, the MulTraSys project aims to design and simulate a multimodal transport system consisting of an automated tugger train AGV and several automated UAVs (quadrocopters).

The objective of the research project is divided into the following sub-objectives:

1. Development of a solution concept for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP)
2. Development of an automated navigation concept
3. Simulative implementation and validation