| dc.description.abstract | With the enlargement of industrial production scale and the improvement of the extent of automation, material handling expenses accounting for the cost of industrial production is getting larger. According to the research of Tompkin and White in 1984, it was pointed out that the cost of material handling accounts for about twenty percent to half of the overall operating cost. Therefore, choosing an appropriate automated material handling systems is much significant. Using automated material handling systems is not only able to increase the efficiency of material handling, but also it can save the handling cost. Among these things, Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) is provided with productivity and elasticity the most.
This study develops a set dispatching rules, which is expected to increase the efficiency of transit, for single-load AGV in a tandem AGV system. Owing to that picking-up and delivering a part in a tandem AGV system is partitioned into intra-zone transit and inter-zone transit, hence the dispatching rules as a consequence of this investigation are principally divided into two parts:
1.Intra-zone AGV pickup-dispatching rules
In tandem AGV systems, as AGV proceeds pickup intra-zone, dispatching rules are adopted to decide which work is picked up in a certain workstation.
2.Inter-zone part-delivery rules
Inter-zone part-delivery rules mean that as delivering a work from one zone to another is requested, AGV shall deliver the work to an appropriate transit station based on these rules when a certain transit station in a certain zone is requested to be responsible for delivery.
In this study, we recombine these rules mentioned above based on the amount of WIP in a closed system. By means of computer simulation, we can find out the optimal dispatching combination and test which rules resulting in best performances. | en_US |