DISPATCHING AUTOMATED GUIDED VEHICLES CONSIDERING TRANSPORT LOAD TRANSFERS

The paper presents a dispatching algorithm for Automated Guided Vehicle systems that considers transport load transfers between vehicles to improve system performance. Transfers are primarily neglected so far to control Automated Guided Vehicle systems. Nevertheless, applications from other domains like courier services demonstrate an efficiency increase by considering transfers. The concept of transfers allows an exchange of transport items between vehicles during transport execution. Therefore, a transport job is divided into sub-transport jobs executed by different vehicles. With our algorithm, transfers are planned ad-hoc depending on the current system status in real-time. The objective is to improve system performance by decreasing vehicle utilization to yield higher throughput. A case study examines the algorithm using a material flow simulation study. As a key result, the simulation study revealed that vehicle utilization could be reduced up to 4 % for the same throughput when transport load transfers are allowed.