A Communication Protocol and Monitoring Policy for Input/Output Vehicles in an Automatic Storage and Retrieval System

The acquisition and processing of equipment information is pivotol to control and management of the automated storage and retrieval system.The work of this paper is based on the automatic storage and retrieval experimental system of Wuhan University of Technology.First,the output/input flow and the control information of storage/retrieval vehicle are studied and the plotting finite state machine model of the stacking crane is established.Then,the communication protocol between the center con- trol management computer and the PLC of stacking crane is designed.Finally,the stacking crane’ s monitoring data,which in- clude operating time,running states and real-time position status,are gained by analyzing the communication protocol.The de- tailed program for the acquisition and processing of monitoring information is developed.This method is suitable for the equipment monitoring of the whole system,and provides a platform for studying the intelligent control and optimal scheduling strategies of AS/RS.