Large-scale multi-load AGVs conflict-free scheduling based on intelligent e-commerce warehouse

Fanchao Meng, Fanhao Meng, Weigong Lv, Dianhui Chu

Abstract: The increasing development of e-commerce logistics industry has led to the widespread application of automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) in intelligent warehouses. The conflict-free scheduling of large-scale multi-load AGVs is a challenging problem in intelligent e-commerce warehouse. To solve the problem, the principle of adjacent combination of AGV and loading point are used for task allocation, as well as the two-stage shortest path principle is proposed to plan the execution sequence of tasks and reduce the complexity of scheduling. For conflict-free path planning, an intersection-exclusive AGV transportation strategy and a conflict-free path planning method based on the global-local dual dimension is proposed. On the global dimension, the congestion degree of the path is defined in order to select the optimal path. On the local dimension, obstacle avoidance strategy of AGVs are implemented through to optimize the collision-free path of AGVs and avoid collisions. Additionally, a heuristic search method based on simulated annealing is proposed to improve the quality of the solution. The results of experiments show that the proposed method can adequately solve the problem of scheduling multi-load AGVs in a large-scale intelligent ecommerce warehouse.