A Case Study of AGV Scheduling for Production Material Handling

This paper studies the scheduling problem of material handling by AGV in complex stochastic production lines. We establish the AGV distribution rule that each AGV is responsible for only one zone, thus reduce the muti-vehicle problem to single-vehicle problem. Its difficult to use exact model to solve the problem since the scheduling problem is related to the time issue. Most literature adopts heuristic or meta-heuristic methods. We build discrete model to solve the problem based on the special structure of our problem, adding constraints only when loading and unloading events happen. The computational results demonstrate that our model can effectively solve the AGV scheduling problem.