Scheduling for an automated guided vehicle in flexible machine systems

Abstract

To fulfill various customer demands by the same group of machines, flexible machine systems (FMS) are commonly used in fabrication facilities with heavy investment. FMS are computer-controlled systems consisting of several stations where each station specializes in particular operations with an appropriate transport system for the movement of products. In some wafer fabrication facilities, wafers are transferred between the load ports of machines within a bay via an automated guided vehicle (AGV). Multiple transportation tasks are required to be performed in time by the vehicle in order to secure the production schedules. The intra-bay vehicle scheduling problem is studied in this paper, which is strongly NP-hard. A heuristic search approach is proposed, incorporating two heuristic rules. Computational experiments show the effectiveness of the approach.

Simulation-Based Digital Twin of a Complex Shop-Floor Logistics System

“…Typically, the related approaches are applied in an offline way: a series of experiments is performed to find the promising settings, and then the identified solutions need to be realized to bring business value. Simulation-based approaches exist to solve AGV path planning (Muller and Cardinal 2002), vehicle guiding (Duinkerken, ter Hoeven, and Lodewijks 2006), vehicle routing (Klaas, Laroque, Dangelmaier, and Fischer 2011;Faulin, Gilibert, Juan, Vilajosana, and Ruiz 2008), and scheduling (Wang and Zhou 2015) problems. However, only a few approaches exist for fleet capacity planning and vehicle dispatching (Ho and Chien 2006;Li and Kuhl 2017), especially assuming a highly complex and dynamic manufacturing environment with a large quantity of machines and uncertain parameters.…”