A Hybrid Algorithm for Automated Guided Vehicle Routing Problem

Nowadays, automatic systems become crucial in many factories to achieve some tasks such as minimizing cost, maximizing efficiency, quality, and reliability. The planning is important for manufacturing systems to adopt changing conditions. Also, manufacturers want to obtain fast, reliable, qualified and economic products. Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs) are used to meet this need. FMSs make production fast, qualified, reliable and economic by using computer-controlled structure that includes robots and transportation systems. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and FMS are thought to be integrated because FMSs use AGVs as a part of transportation in the factory. AGVs are used to carry loads, in other words products, in production areas, warehouses, factories that use magnets, landmarks, laser sensors, lines to know where they are. AGV scheduling and routing is NP-hard and open-ended problems. In the literature, there are many algorithms and methods are proposed to solve these problems. In this study, we present a hybrid algorithm that is composed of simulated annealing (SA) and Dijkstra’s algorithm to solve the routing problem. The hybrid algorithm is compared with SA algorithm in terms of distance cost using benchmark problems in the literature.