Welcome to Exacta Maestro™!

What is Exacta Maestro™?

Problem:

When adopting new automation, customers often face a daunting decision of choosing a vendor and sticking to that vendor for all their automation needs to complexity and cost barrier of entry. It is often too difficult for a customer integration team to maintain expertise and version control of multiple automation vendors in their application without high cost and effort.

Mission Statement:

The Exacta Maestro Fleet Management software is an application ecosystem that strives to make a universal application strategy for controlling multiple vehicle platforms (agents) under a single, synchronized control plane. The specific control of automation platforms is abstracted to an easy-to-implement interface layer that a host system can implement without understanding the nuances of each individual platform.

Core Tenants:

To achieve this ecosystem, Exacta Maestro implements five key tenants which can be used or discarded as necessary based on the types and capabilities of the automation being included.

  • Task Management: translation of host command to atomic work and assignment of that work
  • Route Planning: guide agents from point A->B in the facility
  • Traffic Control: avoid deadlock scenarios and usage of intersections
  • Real Time Locating Service: Peripheral asset tracking using 3rd party
  • Agent Integration: Individual and specific communication with agent sub-systems

Peripheral Features:

In addition to the core tenants, the following features are also included in an attempt to support the overall mission of the product:

  • Payload tracking: Inventory-lite strategy for use of location management and assignment
  • OPC/UA PLC Integration: Direct control with automation PLC and controls framework
  • Exacta Maestro HMI: Command workstation for manual control and monitoring
  • Maestro Mobile Agent: Allow human operators to be actors in the fleet

Application Architecture:

To support the application goals, the application architecture is built using the Microsoft service fabric (micro-service) platform. This is a modern architecture framework that allows for horizontal scalability and reliability of the application. It also allows the application to be dynamic in the types of resource groups that it can be deployed to. Every thing from on premise hardware to cloud IT services is compatible with the architecture.