Towards Autonomous Logistics: Conceptual, Spatial and Temporal Criteria for Container Cooperation

Abstract

Shipping containers handle most of today's intercontinental transport of packaged goods. Managing them in terms of planning and scheduling is a challenging task due to the complexity and dynamics of the involved processes. Hence, recent developments show an increasing trend towards autonomous control with software agents acting on behalf of the logistic objects. Despite of the high degree of autonomy it is still necessary to cooperate in order to achieve certain goals. This paper argues in favour of conceptual, spatial, and temporal properties on which shipping containers can form groups in order to jointly achieve certain goals. A distributed clustering method based on concept, location, and time is introduced. Subsequently, a case study demonstrates its applicability to a problem in the shipping container domain.