Empowering existing automated material handling systems to rising requirements: FA: Factory automation

Due to higher flexibility demands, smaller lot sizes in production, and tool upgrades leading to higher throughputs existing, Automated Material Handling Systems are facing 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 the subsequent challenges regarding AMHS control, and presents three different approaches for improvement: balancing track utilization by adjusting the path selection process, improving empty vehicle balancing by incorporating predicted near-future transport demands and interaction between AMHS and scheduling/dispatching, in order to consider potential bottlenecks. 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.