Piloting of AGV systems with dispatching rules

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are a highly sophisticated and increasingly popular type of material handling device in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). The research is based on the result of a previous study presented in Albert and Castagna (1996). There, the study consists of the description of a conflict management method. But managing the conflicts is not enough, it is necessary to reduce the number of conflicts too. Thus the productivity could be increased in the system. In this paper, different dispatching rules solve the problem. The objective is to obtain performance information about the dispatching rules. This paper is in two parts. Part 1 analyzes different dispatching rules and in the second part, we study the performance of these rules by simulation.