A feasibility study of the intelligent cart system

This paper presents a feasibility study for an intelligent cart system designed to be used in common airports. The framework provides novel methods to control carts using mobile software agents. In airport terminals, it is desirable that carts draw themselves together automatically after being used so that manual collection becomes less laborious. In order to avoid excessive energy consumption by the carts, we employ mobile software agents and RFID to locate carts scattered in a field and cause them to autonomously determine their moving behavior using clustering method based on the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. We have implemented a simulator that produces the route and waiting timing for each cart, thus produces the precise instructions that each cart follows. We report the observations we have obtained from the experiments.