Self-organizing control of carrier sequence in AGV transportation system

This paper proposes a system which realizes a collective autonomous behavior such as an autonomous conveyance order formation in the automatic guided vehicle (AGV) transportation system. We attempt to deal with a large scale distributed autonomous system in a dynamic environment. When using a global evaluation function in order to control each agent, it is necessary to rewrite the global evaluation function of the system whenever the environment changes. If we use such a method, the system cannot be regarded as a real distributed autonomous system. In this paper, we propose two ideas in order to realize a dynamically reconfigurable formation in a dynamic environment, namely, the learning based on the agent´s own action and the interaction with the other agents by the relative evaluation. By using these ideas, it is shown that the dynamically reconfigurable formation emerges as an autonomous conveyance order formation of AGV transportation systems