Simultaneous Scheduling of Machines and AGVs in Flexible Manufacturing System by Using Particle Swarm Vehicle Heuristic Algorithm

Medikondu Nageswararao[1] K.NarayanaRao[2] ,G.RanagaJanardhana[3]
Page No. 50-57

Scheduling of machines and transportation devices like Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) in a
Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is a typical N-P hard problem. Even though several
algorithms were employed to solve this combinatorial optimization problem, most of the work
concentrated on solving the problems of machines and material handling independently. In this
paper the authors have attempted to schedule both the machines and AGVs simultaneously, with
Rebust Factor Maximization as objective, for which Particle Swarm Vehicle Heuristic (PSVHA) is
applied. Operations based coding is employed to represent the solution vector. We have developed
a separate heuristic for assigning the vehicles and this is integrated with the traditional PSVHA
approach. The hybridized approach is tested on a number of benchmark problems whose results
outperformed those available in the literature.
Keywords— Scheduling, Flexible Manufacturing System, Automated Guided Vehicle, Particle
swarm Vehicle Heuristic Algorithm