Development of a heuristic modeling approach to study the efficiency of cellular AGVs in intralogistics

A continuously growing number of product variants is presenting companies in the manufacturing and logistics sectors with increasing challenges. This increases the demands on transport logistics and the flexibility of the transport systems used.

One approach to making the transport process more flexible is the use of cellular transport units, which can be formed from autonomously operating driverless transport vehicles (AGVs), among other things. The individual AGVs are designed as modular units that can be variably interconnected depending on the requirements and size of the products to be transported. Cellular AGVs offer, among other things, the advantage that they can transport products of different sizes and are easily scalable compared to inflexible systems by increasing the number of vehicles used in the system.

The aim of the ZellFTF research project is to investigate the economic and logistical efficiency of using cellular transport units compared to conventional approaches (e.g. transport with forklifts). To achieve this, the research project will formulate a mathematical optimization model for the vehicle routing problem (VRP) and implement a heuristic to solve the model. Afterwards, a simulation model will be created to perform a scenario study to validate the approach.

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