Austrian Post faces high parcel volumes and labor shortages, driving the need for increased transparency and automation in its logistics centers.
An overview of the diverse machinery in a logistics center, including sorters, auto-unloaders, pick-and-place robots, and automated guided vehicles (AGVs).
Key considerations like scalability, strategic ownership over vendor solutions, interoperability, and operational monitoring are crucial before building an IIoT platform.
The platform is conceptualized as a nervous system that connects the shop floor machines (muscles) to the central IT systems (brain), enabling IT/OT convergence.
The platform uses on-prem connectors for protocols like OPC UA and MODBUS, a central MQTT broker, and integrates with Kafka for streaming and Databricks for analytics.
A practical example shows how cameras monitor buffer zones to trigger transport orders for automated guided vehicles (AGVs) via the platform's MQTT bridge.
The platform evolved from a single edge server to a scalable cloud solution, with future plans to onboard more machines and enable complex machine-to-machine use cases.
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.