Locating Idle Vehicles in Tandem-Loop Automated Guided Vehicle Systems to Minimize the Maximum Response Time

An automated guided vehicle (AGV) system is a group of collaborating unmanned vehicles which is commonly used for transporting materials within manufacturing, warehousing, or distribution systems. The performance of an AGV system depends on the dispatching rules used to assign vehicles to pickup requests, the vehicle routing protocols, and the home location of idle vehicles, which are called dwell points. In manufacturing and distribution environments which emphasize just-in-time principles, performance measures for material handling are based on response times for pickup requests and equipment utilization. In an AGV system, the response time for a pickup request is the time that it takes for the vehicle to travel from its dwell point to the pickup station. In this article, an exact dynamic programming algorithm for selecting dwell points in a tandem-loop multiple-vehicle AGV system is presented. The objective of the model is to minimize the maximum response time for all pickup requests in a given shift. The recursive algorithm considers time restrictions on the availability of vehicles during the shift.