Study of AGVS design and dispatching rules by analytical and simulation methods

Abstract

An AGVS has several design parameters. Each of these parameters has been addressed in past literature. This study includes two parts. In the first part, we try to integrate analytical and simulation models to propose a general design methodology for AGVSs. This study is based on the results of previous studies and then links some of the analytical methods with the simulation method. We use a two-stage approach. First, we apply analytical models to get the important design factors to serve as input for the later simulation stage. The second stage is to perform more detailed simulation. In the second part of this study, we propose a heuristic vehicle-dispatching rule, which considers both distance and queue size to assign AGVs, and compare this with existing dispatching rules. The implementation of the vehicle dispatching rules uses the above two-stage methods. The results show that our dispatching rule has advantages over existing rules and the methodology of the two-stage approach is an efficient design procedure.