Flexible guidepath design for automated guided vehicle systems

We address the problem of unidirectional guidepath layout design for automated guided vehicle systems- A two-step layout design method to consider both loaded and empty vehicle movements is developed to guarantee a complete layout design. First, the flow path selection (FPS) problem is formulated to design guidepath layout with the objective of minimizing loaded vehicle movements. Both a mathematical model and a heuristic algorithm for FPS are presented. Since AGV guidepath layouts are used by both loaded and empty vehicles, the FPS does not guarantee a closed or complete layout design. For the case when an incomplete or unclosed layout is produced from the first step, a complementary layout design (CLD) approach to convert the incomplete layout into complete one with the consideration of empty vehicle movements is considered in the second step. A heuristic for the CLD problem is developed. An example problem is used to illustrate the whole design approach.