Determining a Loop Material Flow Pattern for Automatic Guided Vehicle Systems on a Facility Layout

TL;DR

This paper introduces a heuristic method to design efficient loop material flow patterns for AGV systems, reducing handling distances and computational time on facility layouts.

Contribution

It proposes a novel heuristic approach that approximates total handling costs, enabling faster and effective design of AGV loop patterns.

Findings

Significant reduction in computational time compared to exact methods

Effective approximation of total handling costs

Improved loop pattern design for AGV systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present a heuristic procedure for designing a loop material flow pattern on a given facility layout with the aim of minimizing the total material handling distances. We present an approximation of the total material handling costs and greatly drop the required computational time by minimizing the approximation instead of the original objective function.