A Time-Efficient Approach to Solve Conflicts and Deadlocks for Scheduling AGVs in Warehousing Applications

摘要

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) have been widely used in automated warehouses. Coordination between AGVs and real-time performance in a large-scale system are key issues. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a time-efficient method to solve conflicts and deadlocks in multi-AGV systems for warehouses. The method includes four main parts: map initialization, candidate route planning, scheduling strategy planning for routes, and selection of the strategy having minimum makespan. It solves conflicts and deadlocks using time windows and improves the real-time performance with a high-efficient time window arranging operation. The proposed method is validated by means of simulation in a real warehouse environment.