FAQ

The following frequently asked questions are related to technical system information. See the User Guide FAQ for FAQ targeting end users.

General

Q: What Brands of VGVs or AGVs can Exacta Maestro™ manage?
A: Today, our automation pool includes: Bastian AGVs (powered by BlueBotics), Raymond AutoSWR (not yet on the market, powered by Kollmorgen), Raymond automated 4250 (not yet on the market, powered by Kollmorgen), Raymond order picker, Raymond Courier (3030 and 3020, powered by Seegrid), Exacta Maestro™ Mobile Client (human UI to treat a person as an agent). Each of these has a different profile of function which Exacta Maestro™ has specific implementation to handle. For instance, the Raymond order picker is a semi-automated “man-ed” vehicle that does not have a traffic management requirement at all. In contrast, the Raymond AutoSWR leverages traffic management through Kollmorgen and is overlaid with full Exacta Maestro™-controlled traffic platforms.

Note that our platform is built to be easily extendible to embrace new technologies and platforms, so if there is key interest in an AGV platform or vendor, we can scope out the work to build our integration and add that to our toolkit.

Q: What are the core functions of Exacta Maestro™?
A: Exacta Maestro™ works with various sub-systems to take over the necessary features for effective fleet operations. These include Task Management, Traffic Control, Route Planning, Real-Time Locating Service (RTLS) integration, and Agent Integration

Q: Are there Other valuable Exacta Maestro™ Functions I should know about?
A: Exacta Maestro™ provides many utilities to augment the core functions of the fleet.

  • Container Storage Management: We can act as an island of automation where you do not need to track specific inventory locations of product. We can make the assignments for you
  • Aliasing: Many vehicle platforms have specific naming conventions for locations, agent names, etc. We can alias these out to your “Host Names”, where applicable, so that you operate in variables you are accustom to.
  • Event Tracking: Built-in, interactive logging. You can view assignments, completions, exceptions, etc within our HMI

Traffic Control

Q: What inputs does Exacta Maestro™ support?
A: Exacta Maestro™ itself only directly exposes a standard webAPI endpoint for task management and vehicle control. However, depending on the requirement, we leverage other modules of the Exacta suite to act as a bridge between Exacta Maestro™ fleet director and the peripheral automation.

Q: How to define / create system logics for my application?
A: Today, the business logic is setup by the Bastian deployment group prior to a go-live. Our roadmap has us eventually exposing this to non-developers, but it is internal for now. Note that any change of business logic that fits within the provided feature set would be editable under a perpetual support contract. Our support group would help make the necessary changes.

Q: What is the communication flow between VGVs?
A: As noted above, this can be very different depending on the automation platform we are working with. However, the gross-over-simplification is that we provide a “task” object that includes a “payload” specific to the requirement of that vehicle. That could include data such as ‘source_loc’, ‘destination_loc’, ‘pallet_id’, ‘recommended_route’, etc for a “PickAndDrop” type mission. In addition, we request status updates from the agent or agent platform that we can use to make assignment decisions.

Q: How does the application achieve Route Optimization
A: For us, this falls under a dedicated service that we call “RoutePlanning”. Assuming the vehicle supports this feature, we pre-calculate the best routes for each vehicle to do each task that they support. Then during our task assignment process, we take the calculated route “cost” into account when making our decision (among other criteria).

Q: How to send a task or mission to Exacta Maestro™?
A: One of the big tenants of our Exacta Maestro™ product is being able to vastly abstract the implementation details of the vehicle from the host system (WMS, ERP, etc.). We provide a standard interface that allows the customer to submit tasks and query for status of any vehicle regardless of type. Eg, you could have a Raymond AutoSWR, Bastian AGV, and some yet undefined agent all under Exacta Maestro™, and you would submit tasks, query for agent state, etc all through a universal endpoint. This can also be useful for expandability. When more vehicle platforms become supported by Exacta Maestro™, your integration will most likely change very little or not at all since the vehicle integration is all handled under the hood by Exacta Maestro™.

Architecture/Infrastructure

Q: How does the solution support horizontal scalability?
A: Our application is based on Microsoft’s Service Fabric technology which allows us to scale horizontally with load. In laymen’s terms, this means that we can scale our horsepower by adding virtual machines to a cluster, rather than upgrading to a bigger/more expensive server

Q: How does the solutions support high reliability?
A: related to above, Microsoft’s Service Fabric technology allows for the entire cluster to be “active” at a time. This means that any IT infrastructure provided is utilized at any given time. This also means that if any VM (or even a physical server depending on configuration) completely dies, the application continues running.

Q: Is Zero-downtime deployment/upgrades possible?
A: The application infrastructure allows us to do rolling upgrades, allowing us to deploy changes while the application is active in production

Q: What are Multi-tenant environments?
A: This is actually a pre-cursor to a cloud-based solution we are aiming at (not available yet, but in development). However, this does enable cool side-functionality such as hosting multiple test/dev/QA/prod-like environments (etc.) all on the same cluster. Keep in mind that more environments might require a larger cluster, but we’ve noticed a more cost-effective scalability than other traditional methods.