The Flow-Pro (Professional Flow) research project aims to usher in the micrologistics of the future. As part of the mFund federal initiative, the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) is providing around four million euros in funding to six nationwide project partners from science and industry, including Asti InSystems, to investigate and test the networking, fusion and use of mobility, transport and logistics data. The project starts on July 1, 2020 and is scheduled to run for four years.

The aim is to develop a self-organizing logistics system that uses artificial intelligence methods to optimize itself during operation. Climate-friendly strategies such as order execution with optimized energy consumption or ecological route selection are taken into account. Flow-Pro enables the micromobility of goods up to batch size 1 in industrial parks and optimizes intralogistics across companies by land and air. In cooperation, various transport units such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and multicopter drones are being further developed to connect individual technological system boundaries in different networks

With the advent of digitalization in business and industry, logistics solutions are needed that are capable of transporting not only mass-produced goods, but also ever smaller quantities and batch sizes. Today's conventional logistics systems are not designed for these future requirements: They are associated with high costs and lack flexibility. Environmental factors also play a role here: the transport networks are currently mainly burdened by corporate logistics in addition to private transport. In addition, the proportion of empty truck runs and minimum loads is well over 37 percent.

The logistics units "communicate" with each other in order to determine the most suitable candidate for the transportation orders via an AI-supported bidding system. The AI service is to be structured in such a way that all parameters in the logistics network (traffic data, environmental influences, the capabilities of the individual transport units, product data) incorporate the strategies of the companies involved (local and global logistics targets, cost and emission reduction). It should be possible to integrate additional transport units at any time, to make own units available for a fee and thus to optimize logistical goals for all parties involved.

The following six partners are involved in the "FlowPro" project: FHWS (Würzburg-Schweinfurt), Siemens (Munich), EmpQopter (Würzburg), Flexus SAP Intralogistics (Würzburg), Saarland University of Applied Sciences (Transport Telematics Research Group) (Saarbrücken) and Asti InSystems. as