Real‐time routing selection for automated guided vehicles in a flexible manufacturing system

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the development of an architecture for real‐time routing of automated guided vehicles (AGV) in a random flexible manufacturing system (FMS).Design/methodology/approach – AGV routing problem is modeled using an evolutionary algorithm‐based intelligent path planning model, which handles vehicle assignments to material handling requests and makes routing decisions with the objective of maximizing the system throughput. The architecture is implemented on a 3‐layer software environment in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model.Findings – The proposed architecture, along with the evolutionary algorithm‐based routing model, is implemented in a simulated FMS environment using hypothetical production data. In order to benchmark the performance of the path planning algorithm, the same FMS model is run by traditional dispatching rules. The analysis shows that the proposed routing model outperforms the traditional dispatching rules for real‐time rou...

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