A communicating object’s approach for smart logistics and safety issues in warehouses.

Summary A communicating object, or connected object, is a key element of the Internet of Things to shift a perceptible real world into a wide digital virtual world known as the cyber-physical system. Knowing that sustainability, safety, and logistic issues are among the significant goals and challenges of modern industrial enterprises, the communicating object can be a rele- vant concept to guarantee safety performance in logistics and warehouse management. This article presents the impacts and advantages of the communicating object in smart logistics and the design of a communicating object model inspired from Internet of Things European research projects, which controls and monitors safety risks in a hazardous and chemi- cal industrial context. Generic safety-based scenarios are presented, which rely on a set of negotiated interaction mechanisms for storage and picking. The relevant deployment of intelligence in a warehouse management system leads to propose a new concept called ‘‘IoT-controlled Safe Area.’’ Our contribution is to bring informational, communica- tional, and decisional capabilities close to the warehousing physical world thanks to the communicating object. This enables achieving safety assurance with a decrease in the decision-making delay and an increase in the solving efficiency of local and dynamic disruptions, while avoiding inherent shortcomings of the warehouse management system centraliza- tion. For this, an industrial implementation is presented.