A fuzzy logic approach to remaining useful life control and scheduling of cooperating forklifts

A permanent growth of electrical forklifts' applications makes them a dominating indoor and outdoor transportation tool. In spite of an unquestionable appeal of e-mobility, forklifts accumulators undergo a gradual degradation, which has to be suitably maintained. Thus, an appropriate work scheduling and human operator skills are crucial for their remaining useful life control. The paper proposes a comprehensive practical solution, which can be used for settling the above problem. It starts with shaping an appropriate IoT infrastructure located on a designed shopfloor. Using the above infrastructure, a strategy for an identification of Takagi-Sugeno operator model is proposed. Subsequently, a tool for assessing a forklift's accumulator remaining useful life is introduced and integrated with the operator model. These constitute a core component for the final scheduling framework, which can tolerate inevitable delays caused by human operators. All these factor contribute towards the remaining useful life control of the cooperating forklifts accumulators. Finally, the performance of the proposed strategy is verified using selected simulation scenarios involving forklift-based transportation tasks.