Abstract
For quick and effective response to dynamically varying market demands, it is strongly required to make flexible manufacturing systems more efficient by introducing effective and autonomous control and management system. For efficient operation, it is important to decide which work in which area, such as warehouse, loading station, buffer and machining centers in the FMS to be transported to which area. This paper proposes an auction-based scheduling method for FMS which is applied to select and assign a work to AGV whenever it is required. For the unmanned operation at night, the applying order of the auctions concerning from- to areas is separately determined corresponding to time zones, i.e., day, evening and night. A concept of the lowest bid price, which allows accepting participants bidding over the lowest price, is introduced enabling to relax the dominating effect of the order of bid types asked in the auction. Numerical simulations are performed to investigate the properties of the proposed methods with the lowest bid price demonstrating their effectiveness.
