Experimental studies on a local rescheduling procedure for dynamic routing of autonomous decentralized AGV systems

This paper addresses a local rescheduling procedure for a distributed routing system of multiple Automated Guided Vehicles in dynamic environments where the requests for transportation are given in real time. The effectiveness of the proposed method is investigated for a transportation system of 143 nodes and 10–30 AGV systems in a semi-conductor fabricating bay. A distributed and parallel routing system (DPRS) is implemented and tested on an experimental five mobile robot system. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the total computation time by 39% compared with the conventional method without lowering the performance level. It is also experimentally verified that the rescheduling procedure can deal with disturbances in a significantly short computation time.