In manufacturing systems, material transport plays a key role for production process efficiency. Because of their advantages over other material handling systems such as conveyor and robots. AGVs are widely used in flexible manufacturing systems. The scheduling of several AGVs in a non-conflicting manner is a complicated problem, especially when the AGV system is bi-directional. In fact, many undesirable situations may arise such as deadlocks and head-on conflicts if no efficient control policy is used to prevent them. The goal of this paper is to present some interesting problems related to the use of AGV systems and a short overview of papers dealing with those problems especially the routing problem. In this way the authors research works and results concerning the routing of bi-directional AGV systems are presented. In the second section, the key issues to be adressed to efficiently use the AGVs are presented. The approaches the authors developed for the conflict free routing of bi-directional AGV will be briefly presented in the third section. The simulation study is presented in section four and the study the authors made for the compact disc manufacturer is presented in section five.
On the use of automated guided vehicles in flexible manufacturing systems
2007
8 Seiten, 10 Bilder, 25 Quellen
Conference paper
English
Wiley | 1985
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