A novel deadlock control algorithm for a heterogeneous fleet of autonomous transport vehicles in a collaborative intralogistics environment
A. Rathi (TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering)
MB Duinkerken – Mentor (TU Delft - Transport Engineering and Logistics)
R.R. Negenborn – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Transport Engineering and Logistics)
Marloes Hengeveld – Mentor (Accenture Industry X - Manufacturing and Operations)
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Abstract
For high efficiency and flexibility, a fleet of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) both homogeneous and heterogeneous are widely used automation products for material handling in warehouses and automated production lines. Given the layout capacity, the AGVs interact with each other, which provokes challenges in Driverless Transport Vehicle System (DTVS) traffic management in dynamic environments. One of the main challenges is how to avoid collision and deadlock between heterogeneous fleets of AGVs in a bidirectional layout. This research study proposes a deadlock detection and avoidance algorithm that follows the deadlock prediction and uses a dynamic rerouting strategy with Dijkstra to avoid deadlocks. The mission paths are checked in space and time for overlapping edges by four check conditions and cumulative weights and return a boolean value to avoid cyclic deadlocks. For the heterogeneous fleet of AGVs, a standard communication protocol VDA5050 is used to maintain a standard communication interface between vehicles and the traffic management module with cloud-based microservices for increased processing time and interoperability within the warehouse. This communication interface is used to communicate the novel deadlock control algorithm to a heterogeneous fleet of AGVs. The proposed algorithm not only improves the throughput by increasing vehicle operational time but also successfully avoids congestion and deadlocks with high traffic management efficiency in the logistic transportation system.