The automated guided vehicle problem in logistics operations

In this paper, we introduce a model for designing a automatic guided vehicle system (AGVS) with multiple automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) operating under some given strategies and fixed layout. In our model, we take two cargoes into consideration, i.e. two cargoes entering AGVS. We make an assumption that we have known all the information about the first cargo already such as the entering entry and the leaving entry, but the information of the second one is random. Then we develop a two-stage stochastic program model for this problem. Because of its complexity, the optimal solution is difficult to obtain within a short time so that to get optimization is not operable in the real-world application. As a result, we adopt heuristic methods to solve it and do simulation to find useful insights.