Bottom-up approach based on Internet of Things for order fulfillment in a collaborative warehousing environment

Industrial deployment of the Internet Of Things (IOT) provides development of an ideal platform for decentralized management of warehouses. In this paper, we propose an IOT infrastructure for collaborative warehouse order fulfillment based on RFID, ambient intelligence and multi-agent system. It consists of a physical devices layer, a middleware ambient platform, a multi-agent system and an enterprise resource planning. It integrates a bottom-up approach with decision support mechanisms such as self-organization and negotiation protocols between agents based on “com-peration=competition+cooperation” concept. This approach was selected to improve reaction capabilities of decentralized management of warehouses in a dynamic environment. A collaborative warehouse example was conducted to demonstrate the implementation of the proposed infrastructure.