Computer based generation of control programs for a high speed mobile harbor crane in a novel maritime container handling system

There is an ongoing trend to make increased use of automated cranes and driverless vehicles for handling and transportation of the maritime containers. The concept of a mobile harbor system was therefore founded and aimed at developing a novel maritime container handling solution that allows going out to a ship that anchors in the deep water to load and unload containers on sea and then transport them to their destination ports regardless of the water depth. The proposed mobile harbor system has three sub-systems: (i) a high speed mobile harbor crane (HSMHC), (ii) a mobile harbor traffic management (MHTM), and (iii) an intelligent container yard management (ICYM) system. The generation of control programs for controlling the HSMHC system plays a key role in the development of the novel maritime container handling system. In this paper, a method for computer based generation of the PLC programs for controlling the HSMHC system is presented. The 3D virtual simulation is used to describe the control sequence which is mathematically modeled by using the sequence matrix and Petri net technique. Based on the control sequence, the PLC programs are automatically generated and then verified based on the simulation tool. The experiments conducted on the actual prototype of the HSMHC system showed the stable results