Observability of Transportation Systems - A Methodology for Reliability Analysis in Logistics and Manufacturing

Abstract

Real world events are observed by sensors since decades, for instance in the logistics where packages are identified and tracked. This information result in an information flow. This information flow is used to control the physical material flow. Hence, the information flow is a digital representation of the physical material flow. However, to guarantee that the digital representation is in alignment to the physical world is a challenging task. Especially for scenarios with manual operations, the representation is vulnerable for errors. This paper proposes a generic approach to assure consistency between digital and physical world. The paper presents a methodology to model the monitoring of physical entities and to analyse the model to evaluate the risk of unreliable digital representation.