Tandem AGV systems: A partitioning algorithm and performance comparison with conventional AGV systems

In an earlier paper, Bozer and Srinivasan introduced the tandem concept for automated guided vehicle (AGV) systems and presented an analytical model to evaluate the throughput performance of a basic component of the system; namely, a single vehicle serving a set of workstations under the First-Encountered-First-Served rule. In this study, using the above analytical model and certain column generation techniques, we present a heuristic partitioning scheme to configure tandem AGV systems. The partitioning scheme is based on a variation of the well-known set partitioning problem. It is aimed at evenly distributing the workload among all the AGVs in the system. We demonstrate the procedure with two numerical examples. Using simulation, the performance of the tandem configuration obtained for each example is compared to that of the corresponding conventional AGV system.