Developing a dispatching rule for an Automated Guided Vehicle System using a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making method

Automated Guided Vehicle Systems (AGVS) have been widely used in manufacturing systems for material handling. Dispatching is recognized as the key element in AGVS control problems. In this paper, a new dispatching rule is proposed based on the fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making method. The rule utilizes relevant information such as elapsed time of move request, incoming and outgoing buffer status and AGV travelling distance. The performance of the proposed rule is compared with several well known dispatching rules in a hypothetical job shop environment in terms of the system throughput and makespan. Simulation experiments are carried out varying the capacity of buffer queues and the number of AGVs. The rule presented in this study appears to be more effective for dispatching AGVs than the other rules.