Cross Entropy Model for AGV Routing Time

Today, in order to survive in the rapid challenging environment of the modern manufacturing era, manufacturers are forced to adopt new technologies, especially for products that are made in small batch production. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) has been applied for the automated manufacturing system. In industrial application, manufacturing factory is brought the mobile vehicle to incorporate working with other machine in order to being the automated manufacturing system (Arai et al., 2002).Advanced automated manufacturing systems are widely used in industrial companies where productivity objectives have to be met. These systems often being costly, they must be designed to be as efficient as possible. Here, an automated manufacturing system in a job shop layout considering AGV as a material handling resource is focused. The key issue in manufacturing operations is how to produce high quality products at low costs in such a way that the diversified demand is met. Hence, modern manufacturing companies should become as responsive as possible in order to satisfy customer demands. Material handling accounts for 30–75% of the total cost of a product, and efficient material handling can result in reducing the manufacturing system operations cost by 15–30% (Sule, 1994). These points underscore the importance of material handling costs reduction as a key element in improving the cost structure of a product. The determination of a material handling system involves both the selection of suitable material handling equipment and the assignment of material handling operations to each individual piece of equipment. Hence, material handling system selection can be defined as the selection of material handling equipment to perform material handling operations within a working area considering all aspects of the products to be handled.The material handling system plays a crucial role in automated manufacturing systems. When inadequately designed, the material handling system indeed can adversely affect the overall performance of the system and lead to substantial losses in productivity and competitiveness, and to unacceptably long lead times. Thus, to avoid such pitfalls, material handling system design must be integrated into the overall design of the manufacturing system centering on the selection of machines and the allocation of operations to the machines (Butdee and Suebsomran, 2006; Shirazi et al., 2010).Automated guided vehicle is an intelligent machine that has ‘intelligence’ to determine its motion status according to the environmental conditions systems. AGVs are advanced material handling devices extensively used in automated manufacturing systems (AMS) to transport materials among workstations (Vis, 2006).