Scheduling problems of automated guided vehicles in job shop, flow shop, and container terminals

Automated guided vehicles have been widely used in flexible manufacturing systems especially in a job shop and flow shop. Recently, they are included in other fields such as container terminals. This paper demonstrates a literature review of the last three decades about the scheduling problems of the automated guided vehicles in three main classes, namely job shops, flow shops, and container terminals. We classify the literature according to the scheduling problems and the solution approaches. The results of the survey are that the solution methods mainly focus on using simulation as a key performance analysis tool, whereas, the big computation times of the developed mathematical models make heuristics approaches are dominant for solving such models. After that, we discuss research gaps to the purpose of finding new research directions.