Design Support of Transportation Routing by Agent Method

Recently, it becomes important to improve transportation capability to attain high productivity of manufacturing. One of the necessary scheme to attain the purpose is that the floor layout is initially to be optimized. After the floor layout is determined, reasonable route position for transportation is decided. Then the transportation route scheduling is determined. In this paper, design support system for transportation routing, based on agent method is proposed. To optimize the transportation route positions, the working space by the side of the equipment is to be considered. In this paper, starting from given floor layout of a factory, an appropriate transportation route is generated using ant algorithm. To check the applicability of the proposed method, case studies are carried out changing constraints and objective functions, and its effects were analyzed.