Experimental evaluation of a cooperative algorithm for autonomous distributed vehicles systems considered with finite buffer capacity

There are so many researches on Autonomous Distributed Manufacturing Systems (ADMSs), where cooperation among agents is used to solve problems, such as scheduling problem and routing problem. We target ADMSs where an ADMS consists of two sub-systems: a Production System (PS) and an Autonomous Transportation System (ATS). This paper discusses an on-line Tasks Assignment and Routing Problem (TARP) for ATSs under conditions of given production schedule and finite buffer capacity. The TARP results in a constrained version of a Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Window´s (PDPTW). In our previous work, a mathematical formulation of the problem was given, and a cooperative algorithm to obtain sub-optimal routes while avoiding deadlocks and buffer overflows was proposed. In this paper, by computational experiments, we will examine the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Computational experiments show that the proposed algorithm can make efficient and deadlock-free routes even though the buffer capacity is less