Vehicle positioning in complex automated transport systems

This paper addresses the problem of vehicle positioning for automated transport in full-automated manufacturing systems. This study is motivated by the complexity of vehicle control found in semiconductor fabrication where the material handling network path is composed of multiple interconnected loops. We propose an integer linear program that minimizes the maximum time needed to serve a transport request. We also present a variant of the model in order to take into account the utilization rate of vehicles. The practical usefulness of the model is also discussed