Online Dispatching and Routing for Automated Guided Vehicles in Pickup and Delivery Systems on Loop-Based Graphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a loop-based algorithm for online, conflict-free scheduling and routing of AGVs in pickup and delivery systems, demonstrating improved or comparable performance with faster computation.

Contribution

It presents a novel loop-based algorithm for conflict-free AGV routing in online settings on loop graphs, outperforming existing methods in efficiency.

Findings

The algorithm outperforms exact, greedy, and metaheuristic methods in experiments.

It achieves comparable or better solutions with less computing time.

Validated on real manufacturing plant instances.

Abstract

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are widely used in various industries, and scheduling and routing them in a conflict-free manner is crucial to their efficient operation. We propose a loop-based algorithm that solves the online, conflict-free scheduling and routing problem for AGVs with any capacity and ordered jobs in loop-based graphs. The proposed algorithm is compared against an exact method, a greedy heuristic and a metaheuristic. We experimentally show, using theoretical and real instances on a model representing a real manufacturing plant, that this algorithm either outperforms the other algorithms or gets an equally good solution in less computing time.