Task Scheduling of Automated Guided Vehicle in Flexible Manufacturing System using Ant Colony Optimization

Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS),equipped with several CNC machines and Auto Guided Vehicle (AGV) based material handling systems has been designed and implemented to have the flexibility and efficiency in production process. After the implementation of FMS, various problems came such as the scheduling of the resources, such as frequent variation in the parts, tools, AGV routings, becomes a complex task. Flexible Manufacturing System has been regularly investigated and it continues to attract both academic and industrial sectors. Automated guided vehicle are used due to their flexibility and compatibility. Scheduling, dispatching and routing of Automated Guided Vehicle are an important task .This has been done traditionally using various mathematical programming techniques. Random search algorithms have been attempted for scheduling in these previous years. Most of these researches have been emphasized only on single objective optimization .In scheduling, multi objective function with conflicting objectives are complex and combinatorial in nature and they hardly have a unique solution. This paper contains multi objective task scheduling of AGV in a flexible manufacturing environment using ant colony optimization. In this paper I have made an attempt to find the near optimum schedule for two AGVs based on the balanced workload between them and the minimum traveling time for their maximum utilization.