Digital solutions have become increasingly important for manufacturing companies to increase their productivity, effectiveness, and competitiveness in a global market, which demands low prices, high quality, and fast delivery times. In order to improve production efficiency, it is also necessary to optimize transportation activities in the production floor via digitization and automation of those processes. Many companies have already used or are planning to use autonomous mobile robots (AMR) to manage production logistics more effectively. The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the advanced hardware and software of AMR allow them to perform autonomous tasks in dynamic environments, where they can communicate and independently coordinate with other resources, such as machines and systems, and thus decentralize the decision-making steps of manufacturing processes. Decentralized decision making allows the manufacturing system to dynamically adapt to changes in the system state and environment. Such developments have affected traditional planning and control methods and decision-making processes, but they also require the software and embedded artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to be more capable of executing these decisions. In this study, we describe how to use a 3D virtual factory concept to integrate an AMR system with AI functionality into the production logistics of the food industry. The paper presents an approach to analyze the performance of AMR in the transportation of goods on the manufacturing plant floor, based on the creation and simulation of the 3D layout, the monitoring of key performance indicators (KPI), and the use of AI for proactive decision making in production planning. A case study of the food industry demonstrates the relevance and feasibility of the proposed approach.
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