Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML
openTCS is a control system software capable of coordinating a fleet of automatic vehicles (e.g. automated guided vehicles or mobile robots) and thus e.g. optimize transportation processes in production plants or warehouses. The software works completely independent of the vehicle’s type and manufacturer and can control different types of vehicles simultaneously. Transport and movement orders can be input either manually by an operator or by peripheral software, e.g. a warehouse management system.
openTCS is free software and can be downloaded free of charge and including the source code from the project’s homepage. Related documentation can be found there as well.
Advantages of openTCS:
- For operators of vehicle fleets, using openTCS provides security of investment, as the availability of the software’s source code makes them independent from system suppliers. Any experienced developer can make customizations for them, e.g. to extend the vehicle fleet or integrate changes to processes.
- Suppliers of automatic vehicles do not have to develop their own control system software or buy a competitor’s solution. openTCS provides a reasonable compromise between both ways.
The software is being maintained by employees of Fraunhofer IML and improved in the course of research and industrial projects. If you would like to implement a transportation system using openTCS, we gladly support you with the integration or the customization of the software for your concrete use case. For companies that would like to develop their own solutions based on openTCS, we also offer multi-day developer trainings.