Scalability investigations on communication traffic in distributed routing of autonomous logistic objects

In current transport logistics, routing is usually done centrally. A dedicated routing instance solves the optimisation problem of finding the best solution to handle the current set of orders with the set of available vehicles under constraints such as vehicle utilisation, punctuality etc. Because of the increasing complexity of logistic processes, approaches have been suggested recently which change this centralised routing paradigm towards a distributed approach with autonomous logistic entities (vehicles and goods) deciding on their own. To be able to obtain enough knowledge for reasonable decisions, the logistic entities have to communicate with each other. For this interaction, the information exchange concept DLRP (Distributed Logistic Routing Protocol) has been proposed before. The work presented in this paper will focus on the aspect of scalability of communication in a DLRP scenario. Message flooding is identified as potential challenge for the scalability of DLRP, and intelligent flooding restrictions to the communication traffic are applied.