A MILP Formulation for an Automated Guided Vehicle Scheduling Problem with Battery Constraints

Abstract

Nowadays, AGVs are frequently used in industries for the internal transportation of goods or pallets. The aim of an AGV-based internal transportation system is to transfer the right amount of the right material to the right place at the right time. Therefore, the determination of a good scheduling of the AGV tasks is essential to overcome delays in production and material handling processes. In this work, we study a scheduling problem arising from an internal transportation system of a company operating in the manufacturing field where AGVs subject to battery constraints are used for horizontal movement of materials. The aim of this work is to highlight the impact of the AGV battery recharge times on the completion time of the material handling process. To this aim, we propose an original mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation to optimally solve the addressed problem. The proposed model is validated on test instances built from real data comparing its results with those obtained disregarding the battery constraints. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution method and the impact of the AGV charging time on the handling process completion time.