Strategies to Empower Existing Automated Material Handling Systems to Rising Requirements

Due to reasons like higher flexibility demands, smaller lot sizes in production, and tool upgrades leading to higher throughputs, existing automated material handling systems are facing ever rising requirements. At the same time, the potential to upgrade transport system hardware is limited due to technical reasons as well as its interconnected nature. This paper, therefore, focuses on new possibilities regarding the integration of already existing but not yet used information into automated material handling system (AMHS) control, and presents three different approaches for improvement: 1) improving empty vehicle management strategies by incorporating near-future transports demands; 2) balancing track utilization by adjusting path selection processes; and 3) interaction between AMHS and scheduling/dispatching, in order to consider potential bottle-necks. Each of these approaches improves AMHS performance; in combination they have the potential to empower the system to handle future demands with little or no hardware manipulations.