Online Dispatching and Routing for Automated Guided Vehicles in Pickup and Delivery Systems on Loop-Based Graphs

Abstract

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are widely used in various industries, and scheduling and routing them in a conflict-free manner is crucial to their efficient operation. We propose a loop-based algorithm that solves the online, conflict-free scheduling and routing problem for AGVs with any capacity and ordered jobs in loop-based graphs. The proposed algorithm is compared against an exact method, a greedy heuristic and a metaheuristic. We experimentally show, using theoretical and real instances on a model representing a real manufacturing plant, that this algorithm either outperforms the other algorithms or gets an equally good solution in less computing time.

Published in the Journal of Combinatorial Optimization. Version of Record available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-026-01410-x . A SharedIt view-only version is available at https://rdcu.be/e7mHq . 17 pages, 4 figures