Deadlock avoidance in automated guided vehicle systems

Automated guided vehicle systems (AGVSs) are the most flexible means to transport pieces among workstations of an automated manufacturing system (AMS). The control of such systems must be in charge of avoiding collisions and deadlock conditions. The paper formulates a control scheme to face this problem. In particular, some algorithms are proposed to control in real time path assignments to the vehicles and their moves from zone to zone in the system. A final discussion compares the proposed approach to other methods offered by the literature