DISPATCHING, ROUTING, AND SCHEDULING OF 2 AUTOMATED GUIDED VEHICLES IN A FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM

This article presents a new approach for planning the dispatching, con flict-free routing, and scheduling of automated guided vehicles in a f lexible manufacturing system. The problem is solved optimally in an in tegrated manner, contrary to the traditional approach in which the pro blem is decomposed in three steps that are solved sequentially. The al gorithm is based on dynamic programming and is solved on a rolling tim e horizon. Three dominance criteria are used to limit the size of the state space. The method finds the transportation plan minimizing the m akespan (the completion time for all the tasks). Various results are d iscussed. A heuristic version of the algorithm is also proposed for an extension of the method to many vehicles.