Execution layer between a WMS and the robot control system
Open WES is an open source warehouse execution system (WES), written in Java and released under the MIT license. Its documentation places it between the WMS, which owns orders and inventory, and the RCS that drives the robots. Open WES turns inbound and outbound orders into tasks, picks the stock and the workstation for each, then hands container moves over to the equipment. The same documentation says a site with no WMS can run it as a standalone one.
Robot-zone allocation, scriptable callbacks, pf4j plugins
- Robot zones and manual zones handled apart: in robotic zones, the algorithm module assigns orders to workstations and allocates stock; manual zones get their own stock allocation.
- Callbacks with a converter step: a new container task, a robot call, a picked order or a sealed container fires a callback to the WMS or to the equipment system. A converter written in JavaScript, in Java or as a template can rewrite the payload before it goes out.
- pf4j plugins: every domain exposes a plugin interface with before and after hooks, and the repository ships an SDK plus an example plugin.
- Business metrics in Prometheus: all three servers expose
/actuator/prometheuswith counters for inbound, outbound, tasks and stock, and the web UI embeds the Grafana dashboards.
Sixteen containers, no tagged release since January 2025
The README quick start builds everything from source. Its one-liner brings up a docker-compose.yml with sixteen containers: the frontend and the three Java servers (gateway, WES, Station) compile on the spot, alongside MySQL 8.0, Redis 7.2, Nacos 2.0.0 and a Prometheus, Grafana and Loki stack. The frontend build pulls npm packages from the Chinese mirror npmmirror.com unless NPM_REGISTRY says otherwise. The file leaves the MySQL root password set to root and publishes the MySQL, Redis and Nacos ports on the host. Nacos is pinned to 2.0.0: in issue #21 the maintainer recommends it over 3.0, which needs authentication settings.
Minimum hardware is 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM. The production deployment guide adds 100 GB of SSD to that floor and recommends 8 cores, 16 GB of RAM and 500 GB of storage for production use.
The UI ships in English and Chinese. Those are the only two translation files in the web client.
The bundled AI is a chat assistant tied to ZhipuAI. The ai-core module holds a chat endpoint, SQL generation from the database schema and tools that query SKUs, stocktakes, warehouses and system settings. Its shipped configuration points at ZhipuAI's GLM-4-air model and a Pinecone vector store, both hosted services.
The README targets highly automated warehouses. It recommends Open WES to sites that coordinate robots, AGVs or IoT devices in real time, and points low-automation operations that want a proven product with vendor support toward a traditional WMS. For that second group, ModernWMS, an open source WMS for SMEs, covers receiving, stock and shipping.
v1.0.0, tagged on January 20, 2025, is the only release. Development has carried on without a new tag: the last commit on master is from June 1, 2026, and a feature branch kept receiving commits until October 13, 2026. The jingsewu account authored 127 of the commits on master; the next contributor, 40. According to the maintainer in issue #29, the openwes.top server the README still links to expired in late 2025. The docs now live in the openwes-docs repository, and the project's GitHub page points to openwes.site.