Planning and scheduling in a flexible manufacturing system using a dynamic routing method for automated guided vehicles

An approach that can dynamically solve the planning and scheduling problem in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is presented. This problem is formulated as the determination of an optimal routing assignment of p automated guided vehicles among m workstations in order to accomplish N tasks in an FMS. A useful task representation called workgraph is introduced to facilitate the latter computation; then the A* search algorithm, the minimax criterion, and source heuristic rules are used to solve this routing assignment problem dynamically. The approach obtains a near-optimal solution in moderate computation time, and, in addition, solves some dynamic situations so as to make the FMS more flexible