Microservice Terminal Simulator

Introduction

Hi, I am Besm Osman, a fourth year student at Fontys studying at ICT & Software Engineering. For my graduation I am interning at ICT Group. This blog is about my graduation process.

Assignment

Context

ICT group is an international company specializing in software development. ICT works with ECT (Europe Container Terminals). ECT is an international company that manages several container terminals including the biggest terminal in Rotterdam. These terminals are responsible for the container transport from the ships to the trains and trucks with everything in between. ICT Group creates and manages the TOS (terminal operating system). This software manages and automates different vehicles (Automated Guided Vehicles, QC’s, Automated Stacking Cranes, Straddle Carries etc.). The software automates containership processes. Lately ICT has been expanding the software and want to demo their capabilities. To achieve this, they have created a visualization tool in Unity. This can be hooked up with a TOS to visualize the process. Unfortunately, due to several reasons they are unable to properly use their real TOS for demos.

This resulted in a new project to create a simpler version of the TOS named TOS light. This was prototyped in a week by several engineers with the goal to have some simplified terminal operating system that can show the capabilities of their system without needing the full TOS running. This was successful but very limited as there was a heavy time constraint.

My Role

ICT Group wants to continue with the TOS light project. The project will have to be designed from the ground up as their current prototype is not designed with a right architecture and functionality in mind. The main goals are:

• A terminal operating system that when connected to the visualizer can achieve visually similar results as the real TOS.
• A framework for implementing specific behaviors with varying complexity.
• Microservice based architecture. Currently the idea is to have every vehicle responsible for running its own service that communicates with the terminal.
• Expandable to different vehicles and behaviors. The real TOS manages the whole process from the ship to the storage to the trains and trucks with all the vehicles in between. This projects architecture should be expandable to allow all these vehicle behaviors to be implemented in the future.

I will be executing this assignment during my graduation semester for my bachelor in ICT & Software Engineering at Fontys Eindhoven.

So, in summary: The goal of this assignment is to implement a terminal operating system with an expandable microservice architecture that can manages vehicles, simulate their behavior and can pass this information to the visualization. The focus is on the software architecture and implementing simple logic where needed for demo and testing. My job will be to research a fitting architecture and implement this system during my internship.