Scheduling Automated Guided Vehicles: Challenges and Opportunities

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) play a fundamental role in different logistic systems, being widely used for the automatic handling of materials, goods, and containers. The management of AGVs requires the solution of several optimization problems, such as task allocation/scheduling, routing, and path planning, which are often enriched by additional attributes, such as multi-load, battery constraints, and conflict avoidance. Many of these problems are faced in the real-world context of the Italian company E80 Group, one of the world leaders in the production of AGV systems. The literature is huge for all the aforementioned problems, and hence we focus only on the problem of scheduling AGVs, modeled as a Pickup and Delivery Problem (PDP). In particular, we propose a PDP formulation, discuss real-world and literature scheduling applications, and indicate challenges and research opportunities providing a guide for future researches.