In the future, we expect manufacturing companies to follow a new paradigm that mandates more automation and autonomy in production processes. Such smart factories will offer a variety of production technologies as services that can be combined ad-hoc to produce a large number of different product types and variants cost-effectively even in small lot sizes. This is enabled by cyber-physical systems that feature flexible automated planning methods for production scheduling, execution control, and in-factory logistics.
During development, testbeds are required to determine the applicability of integrated systems in such scenarios. Furthermore, benchmarks are needed to quantify and compare system performance in these industry-inspired scenarios at a comprehensible and manageable size which is, at the same time, complex enough to yield meaningful results.
In this chapter, based on our experience in the RoboCup Logistics League (RCLL) as a specific example, we derive a generic blueprint how a holistic benchmark can be developed, which combines a specific scenario with a set of key performance indicators as metrics to evaluate the overall integrated system and its components.