Shuttle transport system
A shuttle transport system is a driverless intralogistics system with various electrically driven shuttle units, usually controlled by swarm intelligence, that operate autonomously on a rail system and independently find the optimal route to the respective transport destination. Shuttle transport systems are used for the automated transport between work and processing stations in production processes, assembly lines and in the automated operation of warehouses.
Depending on the system, the transport shuttles can communicate via radio or infrared with each other, the route or the connected work stations. Due to the decentralized self-control, the overall performance of the system can be freely scaled by simply adding or removing autonomously operating shuttles without requiring additional logistics space. This enables short response times, especially in companies with fluctuating performance requirements and varying throughputs.
Shuttle transport systems enable maximum reliability and high system availability: If a shuttle fails, either another shuttle is taking over the task or the shuttle, like the montrac® transport shuttles from montratec can be manually replaced or removed from the running system, without stopping the entire system. Due to the intelligent decentralized control technology also a replaced shuttle automatically knows the original transport destination.