openTCS

openTCS version 2.4.2 ===================== 0. Table of contents: ===================== 1. Introduction 2. System requirements 3. NetBeans project 4. Getting started 5. Limitations 6. Support 7. Changelog 8. Contributors 1. Introduction: ================ openTCS (short for "open Transportation Control System") is a free base for controlling vehicles in an Automated Guided Vehicle System (AGVS). (It should generally be possible to control any track-guided vehicle with it, but AGVS are the main target.) It is being maintained at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics in Dortmund, Germany. The software runs on the Java platform (JDK 1.7 or later). All libraries required for compiling and/or using it are included in the distribution. openTCS itself is not a complete product you can use "out-of-the-box" to control an AGVS with. It is an implementation of the basic data structures and algorithms (routing, dispatching, scheduling) needed for running an AGVS with more than one vehicle; it tries to be as generic as possible to allow interoperation with track-guided vehicles of practically any vendor. Thus it is usually necessary to at least write and integrate a vehicle driver (called "communication adapter" in openTCS-speak) that translates between the abstract interface of the openTCS kernel and the communication protocol your vehicle understands. Depending on your needs, it might also be necessary to adapt algorithms or add project-specific strategies. The openTCS source code is licensed under the terms of the MIT License. A copy of the license is included in the distribution. (See the file LICENSE.txt.) Please note that openTCS is distributed without any warranty - without even the implied warranty of merchantibility or fitness for a particular purpose. Please refer to the license for details. We are grateful to any developers that have contributed to openTCS. Section 8 contains a list of all contributors. To download the latest version and/or read news about openTCS, please see its web site at http://www.opentcs.org/. 2. System requirements: ======================= The openTCS source code is written in Java. To compile it, you need a Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.7 or later. To run the resulting binaries, you need a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.7 or later. All other required libraries are included in the openTCS distribution. The openTCS build process is automated based on Apache Ant. To build openTCS, you need Apache Ant 1.8 or later. (For more information about Ant please see http://ant.apache.org/.) The whole build process is programmed in the Ant build script - see the file 'build.xml' in the main directory. These are the main build targets you need to know to get started: - buildall: Compiles everything to a runnable state, i.e. after running this target you can use the included shell scripts/batch files to start all system components. - buildapidocs: Generates the API documentation in build/apidocs/. - deployall: Build and packages all system components for production use in deploy/. - runtests: Builds everything and runs all JUnit tests (located in tests/). Test results can be found in reports/junit/. - cleanall: Cleans up everything produced by the other targets. 3. NetBeans project: ==================== The openTCS project team mainly uses NetBeans for development. The NetBeans project data is included in every openTCS release, so if you happen to use NetBeans, too, all you have to do is load the openTCS project in it. After loading the project in NetBeans, you can run e.g. the 'buildall' target in the 'build.xml' file to build the whole system. 4. Getting started: =================== To get started with openTCS, please refer to the introductory documentation that should be included in the distribution. To start developing with openTCS, the file openTCS-Base.jar should be included in your class path. Please refer to the JavaDoc API documentation that should also be included in the distribution, especially: - The interface documentation of org.opentcs.kernel.Kernel describes the main interface of the openTCS kernel that accepts calls from clients. - The class documentation of org.opentcs.remote.rmi.DynamicRemoteKernelProxy describes how to get an instance of org.opentcs.kernel.Kernel from a separate JVM/process. - The package documentation of org.opentcs.data.order describes how to create transport orders programmatically via the kernel interface. - The package documentation of org.opentcs.drivers describes the basic steps needed to create your own vehicle driver. 5. Limitations: =============== openTCS has some known limitations that we hope we can address in the future. Here's a (probably incomplete) list: - The complete API of the kernel with all features is currently only available via RMI/the Kernel interface. This limits clients that need or want to use all of these features to the Java platform (and RMI). - Parts of the documentation and the graphical frontend are currently available in German only. - There is practically no code for deadlock avoidance for concurrently scheduled vehicles, i.e. it's possible that two or more vehicle moving in the same area run into a deadlock, which then needs to be resolved manually. This can be avoided by taking it into account when designing the layout of the vehicles' tracks. 6. Support: =========== Please note that, while we are happy to be able to release openTCS to the public as free software and would like to see it used and improved continuously, the development team cannot provide unlimited free support for it. Supporting, fixing bugs and improving the software requires funding, and we depend on providing commercial openTCS-related services for that. If you have technical/support questions, you can send them via e-mail to info@opentcs.org or use the project's forum at sourceforge.net. The developers involved will try to respond when possible. 7. Changelog: ============= Version 2.4.2 (2013-07-29): --------------------------- - Updated the XML Schema definitions for the host interface. Version 2.4.1 (2013-05-30): --------------------------- - Updated the visualization client, including many bug fixes, usability improvements and internationalization (English and German language). - Properly included a vehicle's length when persisting/materializing a course model. - Removed an erroneous JAXB annotation that led to an exception when trying to persist load generator input data in the generic client. - Changed the startup scripts/batch files to look for extension JARs in lib/openTCS-extensions/ instead of lib/. Version 2.4 (2013-02-07): ------------------------- - Updated JDOM to 2.0.4. - Updated JHotDraw to 7.6. - Updated Checkstyle to 5.6. - Integrated Saxon 9.4 and Apache FOP 1.1 into the build for processing the DocBook manual. - Major overhaul of the visualization client, including: Integration of both modes (modelling and visualization) into a single application, preparation for proper localization and integration of the course layout information into model data structures, making it easier to create complete models including course layout via the kernel API. (This basically allows to implement other clients that can create new models or import/convert existing models from other applications.) Using models containing "old" layout data is still supported but deprecated. - Changed license of the visualization client to LGPL. - Improved support for vehicle energy management: For each vehicle, a specific charging operation may be specified (default: "CHARGE"), which will be used by the dispatcher to automatically create orders to recharge the vehicle's energy source. - Improved strategies for selecting parking positions and charging locations. - Changed initial processing state of a vehicle to UNAVAILABLE, preventing immediate dispatching of vehicles on startup. - Improved kernel methods for withdrawing orders from vehicles and allow setting a vehicle's processing state to UNAVAILABLE to prevent it being dispatched again immediately. - Added kernel method dispatchVehicle() to allow vehicles in state UNAVAILABLE to be dispatched again. - (Re-)Added 'dispensable' flag to class TransportOrder to indicate that an order may be withdrawn automatically by the dispatcher. (Primarily used to make parking orders abortable.) - Improved handling of order sequences. - Added a simple, preliminary implementation of data collection for statistics based on event data in org.opentcs.util.statistics. - Removed class VehicleType and all references to it completely. All information about the vehicles themselves is stored in Vehicle, now, simplifying the code in which VehicleType was used. - Added Vehicle.State.UNAVAILABLE for vehicles that are not in an ERROR state but currently remotely usable, either. (Examples: manual or semi-automatic modes) - Added methods Kernel.sendCommAdapterMessage() and CommunicationAdapter.processMessage() to allow clients to send generic messages to communication adapters associated with vehicles. - Removed methods stop(), pause() and resume() from communication adapter interface as they had not served any purpose for long time. - Removed kernel method getInfoText(), for which the query() method has served as a replacement for a while, now. - Properly propagate exceptions to clients connected via the RMI proxy. - Small bug fixes and improvements to code and documentation. Version 2.3 (2012-09-17): ------------------------- - Moved sources of the generic client into the main project's source tree. - Updated JFreeChart to 1.0.14. - Use JFreeChart for drawing the velocity graph of a communication adapter. - Instead of emitting an event only after the kernel's state changed, emit an additional one before the state transition. - Implemented org.opentcs.data.order.OrderSequence for processes spanning more than one transport order that should be processed by a single vehicle. - Added a set of properties to DriveOrder.Destination and MovementCommand, allowing an order/command to carry additional information for a communication adapter or vehicle, if necessary. - (Re-)Added State.CHARGING and merged State.DRIVING and State.OPERATING into State.EXECUTING in org.opentcs.data.model.Vehicle. - Added a settable threshold for critical and good energy levels of a vehicle. - Added a vehicle specific charging operation to Vehicle, settable by the communication adapter. - Recompute routing tables when (un)locking a path. - Remove org.opentcs.data.model.Path.Action, which wasn't really used anywhere and doesn't provide any benefit over a Path's properties. - Remove a lot of deprecated methods in the kernel interface. - Replace the existing dispatcher with one that is aware of order sequences and vehicles' energy levels and automatically creates orders to recharge vehicles. - Deprecated and largely removed references to org.opentcs.data.model.VehicleType, simplifying some code. - Bug fix in KernelStateOperating.activateTransportOrder(): Use our own references to the transport order, not the one we received as a parameter, as that causes problems if the order has been renamed but a reference with the old name is being used by the calling client. - Moved classes to packages properly separated by functionality, and removed a few utility classes that were not used and didn't provide much. (This effectively means the API provided by the base JAR changed. Fixing any resulting broken imports should be the only thing required to use the new version.) - Small bug fixes and improvements to code and documentation. Version 2.2 (2012-07-10): ------------------------- - Published as free open source software (license: the MIT license, see LICENSE.txt) - Requires Java 1.7 - Update JDOM to 2.0.2 - Integrated kernel and driver GUI into a single application - Basic support for energy management - Support for dynamic load handling devices reported by vehicles/vehicle drivers to the kernel - Simplified integration of vehicle drivers: Vehicle drivers in the class path are found automatically using java.util.ServiceLoader. - Automatic backup copies (in $KERNEL/data/backups/) when saving models - Switched from properties to XML for configuration files - Simplified and more consistent kernel API - Many small bug fixes and adjustments of the included strategies 8. Contributors: ================ We are grateful for anyone helping us to improve openTCS by contributing code or documentation. So far, the developers involved were/are (in alphabetical order by last name): - Hubert Buechter - Iryna Felko - Heinz Huber - Olaf Krause - Sebastian Naumann - Volkmar Pontow - Philipp Seifert - Andreas Trautmann - Stefan Walter - Youssef Zaki If you have contributed to openTCS and we have missed you on this list, please accept our apologies and send us an e-mail (to info@opentcs.org).