Online dispatching of rail-guided vehicles in an automated air cargo terminal

A problem of dispatching rail-guided vehicles (RGVs) for completing transportation requests arises in an automated air cargo terminal. The problem involves transportation requests as appear dynamically in a stochastic manner and aims to minimize total travel distance of each RGV. This work presents a model and a preliminary solution approach for the problem with a single RGV having unit capacity. Computational studies performed on randomly generated instances are used to evaluate the approach, and the performance is compared with that of a priority-based approach which mimics the one used in practice.