Effect of control architectures on automated guided vehicle systems

Automated Guided Vehicle Systems (AGVSs) have been widely adopted by many low to medium manufacturing operations, particularly in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS). The high degree of flexibility and control offered in vehicle routing has made AGVS a proven and viable material handling technology in today's manufacturing systems [Bozer91]. An important aspect in maintaining flexibility in an AGVS is its control architecture. A control architecture provides the backbone of the physical and the informational infrastructure of a system. This research has identified three types of control architectures. They are the centralized, hierarchical, and heterarchical control architectures. When designing an AGVS, most designers do not consider control architecture as a design factor, and do not analyze its effect on the system's performance. The objective of this research is to analyze the effect of control architectures on the relative performance of the AGVS. This research uses simulation to study the effect of control architectures on the AGVS. The simulation model for each control architecture contains two parts -- an AGV controller and a shop floor controller. Both models are programmed in C language. The AGV controller consists of three basic components – vehicle scheduling, vehicle routing, and traffic control. Each of these three components is modeled according to the nature and characteristics of the corresponding control architecture. Two different flow path layouts are considered for the shop floor model. The two layouts are different in size and number of work stations. Performance measures chosen for this study are intended to reflect the responsiveness of the system and the overall system performance under the impact of different control architectures.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

1995

Author dc:creator

• So, Annie Suet-ying

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

etd-10072005-094821

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/45055