Simulation model for AGVS in production environments considering the Facility Layout Problem

In flexible manufacturing systems, an automated guided vehicle (AGV) is often used for material transport. To simulate this transport system, a production environment with aisles and transfer points is required. The arrangement of individual areas within a production environment can be done by solving the Facility Layout Problem (FLP). However, the previous solution methods only consider individual aspects and there are hardly any solution methods that consider the entire production system with regard to the material transport system. Due to this, a FLP solving method that also considers aspects regarding the material handling system is useful so that the created production environments can be simulated and/or used in practice. Therefore, both topics - FLP and AGV - should be considered together

An automatic approach for the generation of the roadmap for multi-AGV systems in an industrial environment

This paper deals with the automatic generation of a roadmap. We propose an approach to build a roadmap for Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) used for logistics operations in industrial environments. The algorithm computes a roadmap in such a way that the coverage, the connectivity and the redundancy of the paths are maximized. In this way the flexibility and the efficiency of the AGV system can be increased. The proposed approach is validated by means of comparison with different roadmaps manually built in real plant