Abstract The control of a number of vehicles moving simultaneously in a rectangular area is considered. Each vehicle performs a set of transportation operations. The aim of control is to perform all operations in a shortest possible time, avoiding any collisions with other vehicles and constant obstacles. The approximate algorithm was developed which uses a heuristic search of state-space graphs. The conclusion from a number of experiments is that the algorithm is able to find a near-optimal solution. If a great number of vehicles moves simultaneously, the computation time becomes significant. For this reason a modified algorithm was developed. It is faster while the decrease of the control quality is relatively small.