DESIGNING A SINGLE LOOP IN BLOCK LAYOUTS FOR AGV

A great deal of production costs belongs to material handling, so a small saving in these costs can greatly affect production systems efficiency. Increasing willingness toward implementing new production systems causes the great use of automated guided vehicles (AGVs). After a short introduction to AGVs, this paper examines designing routes for them. In addition to presenting previous work, we develop two new models for designing unidirectional single loop in an existing block layout. First one finds the shortest loop crosses all the cells while considering some practical limitations. The second approach develops a model for designing a loop that minimizes the total material flow.

Keywords:

Automated guided vehicle , Flow path , Single loop