Traffic control for automated guided vehicles on a grid layout

Automated guided vehicle (AGV) systems are widely used in a variety of industrial environments. The performance of these systems depends heavily on the control strategies used, among others for traffic control. The traffic control strategy should ensure all movements are executed such that the following hard and soft requirements are met. The hard requirements are: the system should be collision-free and deadlock-free, and starvation of all AGVs in the system should not occur. The soft requirements are: priorities should be followed, and starvation of a single AGV and start-stop behavior should be avoided. In this article, we propose an efficient workflow within the traffic control strategy to achieve this. The workflow is suitable for a grid-based system, where the drivable space is discretized into tiles and AGVs move from tile to tile. Tiles need to be reserved for an AGV before the AGV can move over them. Using the workflow, tiles are reserved for AGVs, such that hard requirements are met, and, where possible, also soft requirements are met