SIMULATION OF AUTOMATED GUIDED VEHICLES AS MATERIAL HANDLING SYSTEM IN FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are widely used for material handling in flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) due to their flexibility.The quantitative analysis of an AGV system is useful for determining the operational design issues such as the effect of the number of AGVs on the system ‘s performance. A simulation model Is developed in this paper to see the effect of changing the number of AGVs on the through put of the System, queue lengths, waiting times under certain assumptions by using a number of dispatching rules.The proposed methodology for the simulation model is explained with the help of a detailed example. The simulation model is developed and implemented in simulation software, AweSim