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A leather goods manufacturer was building an automated distribution plant in the Southeast US. Daily, the plant would receive several hundred boxes of new inventory and ship one thousand orders to their customers, each order comprising numerous inventoried items scattered throughout the warehouse. A giant conveyor system was created to move the boxes from receiving to each inventory area; empty boxes would also move along this conveyor to each "pick" area on the plant floor to complete an order and then finally moved to the shipping area. Each box was given a barcode label and barcode readers were scattered along the conveyor route. The orders and received item information was kept in a mainframe computer, but an interface was needed to translate these orders and received goods boxes into conveyor activities. Once the box was filled for the order, the mainframe had to be notified that it was ready for shipping. Conveyor control was performed using several Allen-Bradley PLCs. We created a UNIX-based program that received lists of
orders to be filled and inventory boxes to be received each morning.
As barcodes were detected around the conveyor route, the system determined
whether the next diversion point on the conveyor route had to be triggered
to route the box to a particular area and communicated the proper
instructions to the PLC nearest the diversion point. The time
between barcode detection and conveyor triggering was less than one
second. The application was written in C and responded to barcode
messages in less than 1/10th of a second when 1000 boxes were traveling
along the conveyor, far exceeding the time permitted. Click Here to Return to Main Samples Page
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