The purpose of this paper is to develop an efficient method for solving a vehicle scheduling problem (VSP) in 2D industrial environments. An autonomous vehicle is requested to serve a set of work centers in the shop floor providing transport and delivery tasks while avoiding collisions with obstacles during its travel. The objective is to find a minimum in length, collision-free vehicle routing schedule that serves timely as many as possible work centers in the shop floor. First, the vehicle's environment is mapped into a 2D B-Spline surface embedded in 3D Euclidean space using a robust geometric model. Then, a modified genetic algorithm is applied on the generated surface to search for an optimum legal route schedule that satisfies the requirements of the vehicle's mission. Simulation experiments show that the method is robust enough and can determine in a reasonable computation time a solution to VSP under consideration. There is a gap in the literature for methods that face VSP in shop-floor environments. This paper contributes to filling this gap by implementing a practical method that can be easily programmed and included in a modern service delivery system. In this paper, a new mediod for determining near-optimal, time-constrained collision-free routes for an AV (Autonomous Vehicle) moving in 2D factory environments is presented. During its motion the vehicle is demanded to serve in a specific time-duration as many as possible work centers in the shop floor. The proposed method consists of two phases: first, the 2D vehicle's environment is mapped into a 2D B-Spline surface embedded in 3D Euclidean space using a robust geometric model. Then, a modified GA (Genetic Algorithm) is applied on the generated surface to search for an optimum legal routing schedule that satisfies the requirements of the vehicle's mission. Simulated experiments showed a high performance for the method in terms of the quality of the solutions obtained.
Vehicle scheduling in 2D shop floor environments
Fahrzeugplanung im Umfeld von zweidimensionalen Werkstattebenen
The Industrial Robot ; 36 , 2 ; 176-183
2009
8 Seiten, 11 Bilder, 21 Quellen
Article (Journal)
English
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