Dynamic reactive assignment of tasks in real-time automated guided vehicle environments with potential interruptions

An efficient management of production plants has to consider several external and internal factors, such as potential interruptions of the ongoing processes. Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are becoming a widespread technology that offers many advantages. These AGVs can perform complex tasks in an autonomous way. However, an inefficient schedule of the tasks assigned to an AGV can suffer from unwanted interruptions and idle times, which in turn will affect the total time required by the AGV to complete its assigned tasks. In order to avoid these issues, this paper proposes a heuristic-based approach that: (i) makes use of a delay matrix to estimate circuit delays for different daily times; (ii) employs these estimates to define an initial itinerary of tasks for an AGV; and (iii) dynamically adjusts the initial agenda as new information on actual delays is obtained by the system. The objective is to minimize the total time required for the AGV to complete all the assigned tasks, taking into account situations that generate unexpected disruptions along the circuits that the AGV follows. In order to test and validate the proposed approach, a series of computational experiments utilizing real-life data are carried out. These experiments allow us to measure the improvement gap with respect to the former policy used by the system managers.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism (AEI-010500-2021b-54), the EU Comission (HORIZON-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-01-07, 101057294 AIDEAS), and the Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO/2021/065).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Multi AGV coordination tolerant to communication failures

Nowadays, in many industrial environments that use several robots, there is the problem of controlling traffic. To control traffic, it is necessary to plan safe paths, avoid deadlocks and be immune to network failures. The objective of this project is to implement a system to control this traffic, that is, plan and control one fleet of robots that have multiple tasks to fulfill. This system will be based on implementing TEA *, an algorithm based on A * but that goes with the notion of time. At the same time, the system attempts to supervise, to see if the robots are fulfilling the plan and to guard against any communication failures

Mobile Robots Navigation

Mobile robots navigation includes different interrelated activities: (i) perception, as obtaining and interpreting sensory information; (ii) exploration, as the strategy that guides the robot to select the next direction to go; (iii) mapping, involving the construction of a spatial representation by using the sensory information perceived; (iv) localization, as the strategy to estimate the robot position within the spatial map; (v) path planning, as the strategy to find a path towards a goal location being optimal or not; and (vi) path execution, where motor actions are determined and adapted to environmental changes. The book addresses those activities by integrating results from the research work of several authors all over the world. Research cases are documented in 32 chapters organized within 7 categories next described

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

Proceedings of the Conference on Production Systems and Logistics: CPSL 2022

[no abstract available