FLOW PATH DESIGN ,KNOWLEDGE BASED SELECTION AND RELIABILITY ANALYSIS OF AUTOMATED GUIDED VEHICLES

Abstract

Material handling is an integral part of any manufacturing activity. Given the high costs involved in the equipment and the safety issues, it is imperative to design a good material handling system. The automated guided vehicle system is an important element in the computer integrated manufacturing facility. Like Flexible manufacturing system. Automated guided vehicles provide considerable advantages as compared to other material handling equipment. Design concerns involve issues regarding the flow path design and the number of vehicles in the fleet. The objective of this thesis is to review the literature dealing with Automated Guided Vehicles and the various issues involved in the selection, flow path design and reliability of AGV system. Various journal articles were reviewed for this purpose. Right material handling equipment selection and good design of the material handling system and facility layout can increase productivity and reduce investments and operations' costs. In this study, after describing the material handling equipment selection and pre-design of material handling systems problems and explaining their complexity and solution approaches, it is shown that material handling equipment selection and pre-design of a material handling system can be combined by using a knowledge-based approach. The Automated Guided Vehicle System is very complex and incorporating the reliability aspects in the design process is very important. There is a need to identify the critical components in the system which account for the severe failure of the system. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis and Fault Tree Analysis are useful techniques in identifying these critical components. Once identified, the individual reliabilities can be calculated and block diagrams can be used to calculate the overall system reliability. Key Words: Automated Guided Vehicles, Flexible Manufacturing System, Knowledge-Based System, Reliability Analysis, Linear Programming.