Abstract
Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are being extensively used for intelligent transportation and distribution of materials in warehouses and autoproduction lines due to their attributes of high efficiency and low costs. Such vehicles travel along a predefined route to deliver desired tasks without the supervision of an operator. Much effort in this area has focused primarily on route optimisation and traffic management of these AGVs. However, the health management of these vehicles and their optimal mission configuration have received little attention. To assure their added value, taking a typical AGV transport system as an example, the capability to evaluate reliability issues in AGVs are investigated in this paper. Following a failure modes effects and criticality analysis (FMECA), the reliability of the AGV system is analysed via fault tree analysis (FTA) and the vehicles mission reliability is evaluated using the Petri net (PN) method. By performing the analysis, the acceptability of failure of the mission can be analysed, and hence the service capability and potential profit of the AGV system can be reviewed and the mission altered where performance is unacceptable. The PN method could easily be extended to have the capability to deal with fleet AGV mission reliability assessment.
Highlights
For intelligent transportation and distribution of materials in warehouses and/or manufacturing facilities, there has been in recent years the increasing use of automated guided vehicles (AGVs)
The comparison shows that the simulation results obtained from the Petri net (PN) method are very close to the analytical solutions derived from fault tree analysis (FTA)
In order to develop an efficient and reliable approach to assessing the reliability of AGVs, the PN method is adopted in this paper to calculate the mission and phase reliability of a typical AGV transport system
Summary
For intelligent transportation and distribution of materials in warehouses and/or manufacturing facilities, there has been in recent years the increasing use of automated guided vehicles (AGVs). Given the increasing number of large scale AGV application systems where a significant number of AGVs share the limited number of travel routes, the failure of any one of these AGVs will cause serious traffic chaos. For this reason, considering a complete investigation of the reliability issues of all AGV components and subassemblies is important to ensure the high reliability and availability of AGVs and their success of delivering prescribed tasks and to optimise their maintenance strategies and minimise traffic chaos.
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