Simulated annealing and tabu search approaches to unidirectional flowpath design of Automated Guided Vehicle Systems

In this paper, the authors address the flowpath design issue of Automated Guided Vehicle Systems (AGVSs). In particular, they concentrate on the design of unidirectional flowpaths (i.e. vehicles are restricted to travel only in one direction along a given segment of the flowpath). The authors have developed intelligent heuristics-simulated annealing and tabu search algorithms for the design of unidirectional AGVSs. Different versions of simulated annealing and tabu search algorithms are implemented. The present extensive computational results indicate that both simulated annealing and tabu search yield solutions of adequate quality for all practical purposes. A tabu search implementation with the use of a frequency-based memory structure dominates all tested heuristics in terms of solution quality (i.e. percent deviation from optimality), with an impressive average performance over 45 test problems of less than 0.85% deviation from optimality.