Multi-agent Formula for automated guided vehicles Systems

Abstract

Automated guided vehicle system (AGVS) is traditionally used in manufacturing and warehousing. Especially, AGVS has many applications in flexible manufacturing system (FMS) (see, e.g., Ganesharajah, Hall, & Sriskandarajah, 1998; Seo & Egbelu, 1999;<br /> Vosniakos & Mamalis, (1990). Agents are event-driven objects that can integrant in automated manufacturing environments to control certain tasks. In this paper a set of agents (a multi-agent system) is introduced to control an automated manufacturing environment. The studied problem can be modeled as a job shop where the jobs have to transported between machines by AGVs. This article introduces based on a disjunctive graph to modulate the joint scheduling problem and for machines and AGVs scheduling. The objective is to minimize the make span. Some case studies were used to show the effectiveness of simulation in solving these problems