Scheduling and routing of automated guided vehicles: A hybrid approach [An article from: Computers and Operations Research]

This digital document is a journal article from Computers and Operations Research, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
We propose a hybrid method designed to solve a problem of dispatching and conflict free routing of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). This problem consists in the simultaneous assignment, scheduling and conflict free routing of the vehicles. Our approach consists in a decomposition method where the master problem (scheduling) is modelled with constraint programming and the subproblem (conflict free routing) with mixed integer programming. Logic cuts are generated by the sub problems and used in the master problem to prune optimal scheduling solutions whose routing plan exhibits conflicts. The hybrid method presented herein allowed to solve instances with up to six AGVs.