Scheduling and Routing of AGV's in Complex Dynamic Envrionments

The hardware and control software costs of AGVs keep dropping at a rapid pace and applications involving hundreds of AGVs are being deployed in many different industries. Currently, in state-of-the-art commercial systems, these AGVs are being scheduled through simple greedy dispatching rules. This PhD project will investigate more advanced scheduling and routing algorithms taking the lower-level route execution into account. As such, collision avoidance and congestion effects in aisles will explicitly be taken into account. Furthermore, the implications on the scheduling algorithms of application-specific constraints will be investigated such as blocking of adjacent pathways during task execution, synchronization with order pickers or quay cranes, or capacity constraints at drop-off or pickup locations.