Research On Several Key Issues And Solutions Of Planning And Design For AGV System

This project comes from the project " Integrated Optimization Method of Flexible Workshop Facility Layout and AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) Path Planning with Loading Constraints" of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61304206), takes the planning and design process of one company’s manufacturing system in Shenzhen as the engineering background. It studies several crucial problems of comprehensive design for AGV system and the application deployment as well as the solutions of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) techniques. The objective of this project is to minimize the material handing costs in the complete systematic production process and to realize the management and monitoring for the manufacturing and transportation process in AGV system.The current planning and construction of Chinese industry’s manufacturing system lack a scientific long-range layout design; its full life cycle value is low. Most relevant researches did not make an integrated design and planning for the manufacturing system, some mainly solve these contents in sequence and this mode is not so reasonable. To deal with this situation, this paper makes a relatively general planning and design for the AGV system, which involves the device assignment, device layout, transfer station setting, loop layout and RFID reader deployment. This paper proposes a co-evolutionary framework to integrate the former four design issues of the comprehensive design of AGV system into a framework aiming to maintain the coupling relation of these issues. A hybrid optimization algorithm, namely the genetic invasive weed optimization (IWOGA) is also proposed for the iteration of co-evolutionary framework. Meanwhile, a dual-system co-evolutionary method is here proposed for the comprehensive design of AGV system. Moreover, RFID tags are set in AGV system to manage the manufacturing process after the accomplishment of AGV system design, and the RFID readers are deployed to cover these tags.The main research contents are listed as follow:(1) This paper analyzes several key issues for the planning and design of AGV system and builds the detailed mathematic model involving several design sub-problems of AGV system, it aims to minimize the material transportation costs of the whole manufacturing system.(2) This paper proposes a co-evolutionary framework to integrate the device assignment and layout, transfer station setting and loops’ relative position design together for encoding and iteration. It also proposes the IWOGA hybridizing the genetic algorithm (GA) and invasive weed optimization (IWO), which is employed as the optimization algorithm for the framework. Four benchmark unidirectional loop design numerical examples are employed to validate the IWOGA in addressing the device layout. At last, three designed examples for the device assignment and layout of AGV system validate the advantages of coupling and addressing these issues together.(3) This paper proposes a dual-system co-evolutionary method based on the co-evolutionary framework to address the reality-oriented integrated design of AGV system, and also improves the mathematical model for the design. The proposed dual-system co-evolutionary method is combined by the co-evolutionary framework (act as subsystem A) and a proposed subsystem B. Moreover, a co-evolutionary strategy is brought out to connect these two systems for co-evolution. A designed example of AGV system validates the dual-system co-evolutionary method.(4) This paper studies and builds the mathematical model and optimization strategy for the deployment of RFID readers in AGV system. It sets the RFID tags in the design blueprint of AGV system to implement the management of production process and material transportation. IWOGA is here employed for the optimization of RFID reader deployment. The main goal is to cover all the tags with the minimum readers and working frequencies.In the end, the RFID tags and the optimal layout of RFID readers are embedded in the comprehensive design scheme of AGV system. Thus, the whole design work for the planning and design of AGV system is accomplished.This project studies the comprehensive design problem for the device assignment and layout and the application of RFID techniques to complete the planning and design for AGV system, proposes the solutions and strategies. This paper has some theoretical significances and application values for the planning and design of manufacturing system in industry.