Comparison and evaluation of job selection dispatching rules for integrated scheduling of multi-load automatic guided vehicles serving in variable sized flexible manufacturing system layouts: A simulation study

This paper compares and evaluates the performance of five different conventional job selection dis-patching rules for scheduling of multi-load automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) serving for material handling operations in variable sized flexible manufacturing system (FMS) layout. Four sizes of FMS layout are considered for the performance evaluation of the five types of conventional job se-lection dispatching rules. The FMS layouts under consideration are served by the two multi-load AGVs. The multi-load AGVs cruises under machine initiated the nearest vehicle (NV) dispatching rule for the material handling activities at all work centers (WCs) for all four sizes of FMS layout. Four sizes of FMS layout produce five different types of parts and consist of three, six, nine and twelve work centers and loading-unloading centers, respectively. In the simulation test, it is found that the identical destination first (IDF) job selection rule having selection criterion based on the destination similarity of two picked up jobs outperforms all other job selection dispatching rules for an overall production rate of the FMS (parts/hr) in all four FMS layouts