Integrating Fleet Management Software at Daimler

Integrating Fleet Management Software for Automation & Control Systems

Project owner:	Daimler AG, Kamenz, Germany
Project industry:	Automation & Control Systems
Project services:	Stakeholder Needs Management, Product Requirements Management, Product Architecture Definition, Product Design & Analysis, Product Integration, Product Verification & Validation
Project completion:	2021
Project duration:	16 months

Disclaimer

The Experiences presented below were undertaken by the founders and partners of Waste2Value in their individual professional capacities, prior to the formation of the company. Waste2Value was not directly contracted or engaged to deliver these assignments. These Experiences are shared to illustrate the depth of in-house expertise we bring to our clients and to highlight the quality, rigour, and impact that underpin our approach to every engagement.

Case

Mercedes-Benz Group AG, formerly known as Daimler AG, is one of the world-class leaders in the automotive industry. The group owns and operates a vast network of manufacturing, assembly, and production plants that produce commercial vehicles, vans, trucks, buses, and the full spectrum of components that make part of them. This global footprint is possible only through a network of fully or partially owned subsidiaries and strategic joint ventures.

Over decades of industrialization and operational excellence, the group has developed a deep understanding of the value of standardization, interoperability, and harmonization in maintaining efficient and coordinated production across their worldwide plants. Among the many supply-chain programs and technologies reflecting this maturity is the group’s investment in INTEGRA, a universal interface specification that facilitates two-way communication between shop-floor control devices and the orchestration applications responsible for supervising production.

INTEGRA is considered by many industry experts as the elegant approach crafted by former Daimler AG in response to global scale industrial manufacturing demands. To qualify as a supplier of automation solutions in the Mercedes-Benz Group program, vendors must be capable of independently developing custom software that fully complies with the INTEGRA specification. This middleware software must be seamlessly integrated into the vendor's solution in order to communicate over the network and enable harmonized process orchestration with all other core production systems at the facility.

The case was no different at the battery production subsidiary Deutsche Accumotive GmbH & Co. KG in Kamenz, Saxony which has served since 2012 as the global competence centre for drivetrain battery manufacturing across the Mercedes-Benz Group network. Designed from the ground up for CO₂-neutral operation and Industry 4.0 automation standards, the Accumotive facility relies on advanced mobile robotics for battery production, with INTEGRA serving as the standardized communication protocol across the complex layers of its Distributed Control Systems.

Objectives

The mobile robotics solution design at Accumotive was based on two types of vehicles: the assembly vehicles responsible for transporting the EV batteries under production through each production line station from the frontend to the backend and ultimately the shipping warehouse, and the logistics vehicles responsible for feeding all production lines with raw materials and removing empty carriages. The solution included approximately 80 assembly vehicles and 40 logistics vehicles in total. This large fleet significantly increased the complexity of communication and coordination, requiring the system to manage vehicle locations effectively to prevent gridlocks, avoid route conflicts, and most critically, ensure that all firewall gates remained clear of stationary vehicles—an essential requirement for compliance with fire safety regulations.

The main objective was centered around integrating the supervisory fleet management software into the plant’s automation infrastructure. The major challenge was to enable INTEGRA-compliant communication between the supplier of the fleet management software, the supplier of the mobile robotics vehicles, and all suppliers of central orchestration and control applications of the facility—ensuring that all transport orders, job status updates, and station entry and exit clearances could be exchanged reliably and in real time suited for live 24x7 production environment.

Solution

INTEGRA defines a family of text-based telegrams, structured into different types (information, request, update, etc.) enabling the exchange of data between low-level control devices and high-level supervisory applications. These shop-floor control devices are built into smart robots or automated manufacturing cells that require handling clearances, job assignments, and essential metadata required for executing the job orders from central orchestration platforms and participate in production cycles.

Successful execution of industrial automation projects demands sound systems engineering practices from the outset. A critical success factor is the ability to understand and manage the technical requirements of all supplier systems and consolidate them into a single, fault-free information system which is up-to-date, correct, complete and accessible for all technical teams from the involved parties to use. This is a defining strength of Wate2Value Eco, whose approach centers on coordinating and collaborating with all relevant subject matter experts in defining robust and resilient logic captured in formal system behavior diagrams—such as state machines, activity diagrams and sequence diagrams—that provide a shared technical language for cross-domain communication. Within this project, integrating the mobile robotics fleet management software with the plant’s infrastructure hinged on:

Gathering scattered information from all stakeholders and structuring it into various system models containing system data, functions, and behavior.
Collaborating with all stakeholders to understand their workflows, inputs, outputs, and formats, and integrating that into the system models.
Drafting use cases, requirements, definitions, diagrams, test cases, and test plans to facilitate software development by the relevant stakeholder engineering teams.
Defining technical milestones and project plans by integrating critical schedules from all involved stakeholders and formalizing them into work packages for engineering teams.
Overseeing all technical meetings related to solution development and delivery to reduce complexity, increase clarity, and enhance cross-domain collaboration.
Supervising and approving the delivery of all stages of the solution through extensive verification and validation plans in accordance with the initial stakeholder and system requirements.
Assisting the project owner in understanding the context, constraints, limitations, potentials, upgrades, and improvements of the system—further facilitating project delivery in line with expectations.
Safeguarding the engineering design and development process from drifting into time- and resource-consuming details that add little or no value to the delivered solution.
Ensuring that every functionality executed by the system as a whole complies with European industry and safety standards related to battery-powered driverless industrial trucks (ISO 3691-4:2020).
Negotiating technical compromises in scenarios where a fully satisfactory resolution for all stakeholders is not feasible

Results

Unified multi-stakeholder system specification was delivered through structured modeling activities, enabling all supplier systems to interoperate faultlessly within the INTEGRA-defined communication framework.
Accelerated integration timelines were achieved by applying standardized systems engineering artifacts—such as state machines, sequence diagrams, and interface definitions—which allowed all parties to work from a shared and validated reference design.
Improved stakeholder alignment and decision-making through consistent facilitation of cross-functional engineering sessions, transforming loosely defined expectations into traceable technical requirements and deliverables.
Full traceability across lifecycle stages from requirement definition to final verification, ensuring each system behavior and interaction was validated against business and safety-critical constraints, including ISO 3691-4:2020.
Increased delivery confidence and reduced implementation risk by proactively identifying cross-domain inconsistencies, interface mismatches, and potential design gaps before development cycles began.
Achieved true customer satisfaction by enabling the development & delivery of a robust, technically sound solution that met all operational goals—demonstrating the real-world impact and value of Wate2Value Eco’s systems engineering capabilities.