TASK SCHEDULING OF AGV IN FMS USING NON-TRADITIONAL OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

摘要

Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS), which is equipped with several CNC machines and Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) based material handling system is designed and implemented to gain the flexibility and efficiency of production. After the implementation of FMS, in practice, the scheduling of the resources, such as frequent variation in the parts, tools, AGV routings, becomes a complex task. This is being done traditionally using various mathematical programming techniques. In recent years, random search algorithms have been attempted for scheduling. Most of the research has been emphasized only on single objective optimization. Multi objective problems in scheduling with conflicting objectives are more complex and combinatorial in nature and hardly have a unique solution. This paper addresses multi objective task scheduling of AGV in a flexible manufacturing environment using non-traditional optimization algorithms. In this paper the authors made an attempt to find the near-optimum schedule for two AGVs based on the balanced workload and the minimum traveling time for maximum utilization. The proposed methods are exemplified with illustrations.