Abstract
In production system, layout and operation of the process are frequently modified because of rapid changes in consumer demand. Therefore, as flexible material handling equipment, automated guided vehicle (AGV) has been used instead of conventional conveyor. However, AGVs operation software is incomprehensible and hard to maintain. Also, the efficient traffic control has not been realized by the conventional software.
In this paper, AGVs operation problem is decomposed to condition satisfaction subproblem and combinatorial subproblem. Various modification occurrs in operation conditions such as transportation priority of the first subproblem. And operation know-how is also included in the conditions of this subproblem. Therefore, the IF (condition), THEN (conclusion) rule style is adopted to describe the above conditions, because it is well suited to express operation conditions in non-procedural manner and makes it simple to describe and to modify them. On the other hand, the second subproblem is regard as a kind of combinatorial problem. For this subproblem, the efficient and standardized traffic control algorithm is proposed.
Based on the above concept, the condition and data description method and the configuration in the AGVs operation system are presented. Also, the flexibility and efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated through an example. The operation method has been successfully installed in a real process.
