Operating systems concepts
Developing conflict-free routes for automated guided vehicles
Operations Research
Computers in Industry - Special issue on advances in computer integrated production in honour of professor C.L. Moodie's retirement
A new design of the bi-directional automated guided vehicle system
Proceedings of the 2007 Summer Computer Simulation Conference
Context-aware multi-stage routing
Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1
Robust Reservation-Based Multi-Agent Routing
Proceedings of the 2008 conference on ECAI 2008: 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
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Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) play an important role in flexible manufacturing systems. One of the key issues of using AGVs is the conflict-free routing especially when the AGV system is bi-directional. Two classes of routing algorithms have been proposed in the literature: Optimised pre-planning algorithms, and Real-time routing algorithms. Pre-planning algorithm present the advantage of producing optimal conflict-free routes, but do not deal with changing situations such as vehicle delays and failures. Real-time algorithms present the advantage of being reactive, but are non-optimal. In this paper, we propose to combine the advantages of both. We use a two-stage approach: In the first control stage, a pre-planning method to establish the fastest conflict-free routes for AGVs. In the second stage, conflicts are avoided in a real-time manner when needed. The objective of this last is the avoidance of deadlocks in presence of interruptions while maintaining the established AGVs' routes. Two robust routing algorithms are presented. The efficiency of our approach is analysed using developed simulations.