Dynamic positioning of idle automated guided vehicles

An automated guided vehicle (AGV) is a mobile robot commonly used to carry loads in material handling systems (MHS). Once a transfer is completed, an AGV stops at a home position, a point where it can park until it is assigne d a new task. Determining the home positions is an important control proble m with a direct influence on the overall performance of the MHS. The proble m can be viewed as a location-allocation problem on a network. In this pape r two fast and effective heuristics which dynamically determine the home po sitions are proposed. The methods were tested using two real-world instance s. The obtained results are shown and discussed.