Modeling autonomously controlled automobile terminal processes

Purpose: Automobile terminals play an essential role in automotive supply chains. Due to short planning cycles and volatile planning information, the yard assignment determines terminals performance. Existing planning approaches are not able to cope with these dynamics. This contribution proposes a novel bio-analogue autonomous control method to face these dynamics, its effects and to improve the terminals performance. Methodology: Causes of internal and external terminals dynamics will be discussed and an autonomous control method will be derived. A generic 185arameterizable automobile terminal model and its implementation to a discrete event simulation will be introduced in this paper. This simulation is used to compare the new approach to classical yard assignment. Findings: This paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of causes and effects of dynamics in the context of automobile terminals. It will show that autonomous control outperforms classical approaches under highly dynamic conditions. Originality: The generic modelling approach is a novel description of automobile terminals. It allows investigations of a broad spectrum of use cases. Moreover, the bio-analogue autonomous control for automobile terminals is an innovative approach.