Dynamic Resource Reservation Based Collision and Deadlock Prevention for Multi-AGVs

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are widely used for material handling in warehouses and automated production lines due to their high efficiency and low cost. However, AGVs usually interact with each other because of the restricted capacity of the layout. Although many algorithms have been proposed to address the problem, most of them are inefficient for collision and deadlock avoidance in dynamic environments. This paper proposes a dynamic resource reservation (DRR) based method supporting time-efficient scheduling and collision avoidance of multiple AGVs. In this method, the layout is divided into square blocks with the same size that are abstracted as points in the undirected graph. In order to solve the collision and deadlock problem dynamically, the shared resource points of each vehicle are extracted from their guide paths in real time. Unlike the traditional approaches most of which adopt a static point occupation policy, DRR exploits dynamical reservations of shared resource points to change AGV movement states for avoiding collisions and deadlocks, resulting in better time efficiency. We jointly implement the algorithm on both central and local controllers. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed collision and deadlock prevention method.