Alleviating the Collision States and Fleet Optimization by Introducing a New Generation of Automated Guided Vehicle Systems

Parham Azimi

doi:10.1155/2011/210628

Abstract

The aim of the current research is to propose a new generation of automated guided vehicle systems for alleviating the collision states in material handling systems where the automated guided vehicles movements are allowed to be both unidirectional and bidirectional. The objective function is to maximize the average annual profit in an FMS system using a simulation method. Despite several researches done in this field, this criterion has been studied rarely. The current study includes some new changes in AGV design for preventing some common problems such as congestions and deadlocks based on real profits/costs analysis in a flexible manufacturing system. For this reason, some experiments have been carried out to study the effects of several empty vehicle dispatching rules on average annual profit. The results show that the proposed framework is efficient and robust enough for industrial environments.

Highlights

In modern manufacturing systems, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) have become an integral part of material handling systems
NV, Longest waiting time (LWT), and Largest queue size (LQS) have more ranks but if one compares the mean results for these three rules in Table 3, one finds that NV dominates the two other rules
This paper presents a new generation of AGVs for material handling systems which is called rotating AGV or RAGV and tries to optimize the fleet size by maximizing the average annual profit in an flexible manufacturing system (FMS) environment

Summary

Introduction

In modern manufacturing systems, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) have become an integral part of material handling systems. In these systems, a number of AGVs— which are always called as fleet size—are dedicated to some workstations and storehouses in order to transport the materials in horizontal movements. A bidirectional AGV system can improve the system performance but its cost, is more than the unidirectional one. It increases the risk of potential conflicts which results in more costs in order to solve the conflicts by manual interventions. There are three main strategies for avoiding the issues:

Objectives

Results

Conclusion