Routing AGVs on a mesh-like path topology

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are now becoming an important option in container terminals for transferring containers, in which the number of vehicles involved could be rather large (in the order of a hundred). Thus it is important to route AGVs efficiently, particularly the moves of AGVs should be free of conflicts and deadlocks. The paper presents a provably efficient algorithm for routing AGVs concurrently on a mesh-like path topology. It is proved that our routing strategy guarantees no deadlocks and conflicts among AGVs when moving towards their destinations, a high degree of concurrency can be achieved during our routing process.