AGV dispatching based on workload balancing

We consider a manufacturing job shop with automated guided vehicles. Such a system is characterized by several complex features such as the random pat tern of material flows between machines, the limited capacity of machine bu ffers, shop deadlock phenomena, Boating bottlenecks, etc. We will describe a heuristic procedure for the control of materials flows and automated guid ed vehicles in such a system. The procedure is based on the idea of workloa d balancing; it tries to balance the workload among machines as well as the workload between the machines and the transporters. A deadlock prevention algorithm is embedded in the procedure. We then present the results of simu lation experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed procedure.