A Loop Material Flow System Design for Automated Guided Vehicles

Abstract

We develop an exact integer programming formulation to design a loop material flow system for unit-load automated guided vehicles. The model simultaneously determines both the design of the unidirectional loop flow pattern and the location of the pickup and delivery stations. The objective is to minimize the total loaded-vehicle trip distances. To solve the problem, we concentrate on developing a better formulation for the LP subproblem, preprocessing the problem, identifying the appropriate set of LP/IP routines, analyzing the mathematical properties of the problem, and developing an intelligent branch and bound solution procedure.