LoTLan - A Logistc Task Language for Cyber-Physical Production Systems

The Logistic Task Language (LoTLan) is a simple, but powerful approach to describe your intralogistic materialflow logic, focusing on cyber-phyiscal production systems (CPPS), in a declarativ manner. LoTLan describes of what needs to be done rather than how or who. Job shop schedulars handling the assignment of tasks to an executing entity.

In our context a materialflow represents a transport, carrying goods from one location (pickup) to another (delivery).

Figure 1: Logo of LoTLan.

Official 📚 Documentation.

Example HelloTransport

The simplest transportation task in LoTLan just describes, from which position a container/bin should be picked up and moved to another location. All location as mentioned in the example refer to Figure 1.

Location unloadEmptyPallet
    name = "production_goodspallet"     # actuall real name in the warehouse
    type = "Pallet"                     # what type of bin is located at this location
End

Location warehousePos1
    name = "warehouse_pallet_position1" # actuall real name in the warehouse
    type = "Pallet"                     # what type of bin is located at this location    
End

TransportOrderStep loadEmptyPallet
    Location    warehousePos1 
End

TransportOrderStep unloadEmptyPallet
    Location    goodsPallet 
End

Task transportGoodsPallet
    Transport
    From        loadGoodsPallet
    To          unloadGoodsPallet
End

Figure 2: Example of LoTlan transportation task called 'transportGoodsPallet', defining a transport from goodsPallet to warehousePos1 in a CPPS.

Features

LoTLan also supports few more features next to a simple transportation:

• Serial, parallel and concurrent definition of tasks
• Conditional events, e.g. starting a task when a specific event occured
• Concatenation of tasks, also including infinite loops
• Parameterizable actions
• Constraints definition

Further examples can be found in the 📚 documentation. It also describes how an automatic or manual load/unload action can be done, utilizing events.

License

LoTLan is licensed under Apache 2.0.

Contributors

Peter Detzner, Maximilian Hoerstrup, Dominik Lux

Conference

P. Detzner, T. Kirks and J. Jost, "A Novel Task Language for Natural Interaction in Human-Robot Systems for Warehouse Logistics", 2019 14th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), Toronto, ON, Canada, 2019, pp. 725-730.