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Scheduling of automated guided vehicles and machines in flexible manufacturing systems: a simulation study

Research Authors
Essam Kaoud , Mahmoud Heshmat, Mahmoud A. El-Sharief and Mohamed G. El-Sebaie
Research Year
2020
Research Journal
International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Research Publisher
Inderscience Publishers (IEL)
Research Vol
35-3
Research Rank
1
Research_Pages
372-387
Research Website
https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJISE.2020.107775
Research Abstract

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) have widely expanded in industry sectors all over the world. Scheduling is one of the problems that face the life cycle of FMSs. This paper introduces the simultaneous scheduling problem of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and machines in FMSs. The study is based on discrete event simulation (DES) to solve that problem using benchmark data used by previous studies. The objective of this study is to determine the starting and completion times of each job to minimise the makespan. The results validate the robustness of the simulation model, especially for large-scale problems. Furthermore, they are compared against the other approaches and show consistency.