• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.91-103
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• 2008

In order to simulate the behavior of automated manufacturing systems, the performance of material handling systems should be measured dynamically. Multi-Agent technology could be well adapted for the development of simulator for distributed and intelligent manufacture systems. A multi-agent system is composed of one coordination agent and multiple application agents. Issues in AGVS simulator can be classified by the set-up and operating problems. Decisions on the number of vehicles, bi- or uni-directional guide-path, etc. are fallen into the set-up problem category, while deadlock tree algorithm and conflict resolution are in operating problem. In this paper, a multi-agent based deadlock-free simulator for automated guided vehicle system(AGVS) are proposed through the use of multi-agent technologies and the development of deadlock-free algorithm. In this AGVS simulator proposed, well-known Floyd algorithm is used to create AGVS Guide path, through which AGVS move. Also, AGVs avoid vehicle conflict and deadlock using check path algorithm. And Moving vehicle agents are operated in real-time control by coordination agent. AGV position is dynamically calculated based on the concept of rolling time horizon. Simulator receives and presents operating information of vehicle in AGVS Gaunt chart. The performance of the proposed algorithm and developed simulator based on multi-agent are validated through set of experiments.