OPTIMIZATION OF THE NUMBER OF TRANSPORTATION DEVICES IN A FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM USING EVENT GRAPHS

An important step when designing a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) using automated guided vehicles (AGV's) is the definition of the numb er of AGV's to be used in order to reach a given productivity, A way t o define this number is to consider several scenarios, to define the m inimal number of AGV's required by each scenario, and to keep the maxi mal of these numbers, In this paper, we propose a branch and bound (B& B) approach to define the minimal number of AGV's required for a scena rio, This approach is based on an event graph (]EG) formulation.