In order to deal with unexpected material handling demands in the dynamic environment, an efficient approach applied in the automated guided vehicle (AGV) centralized control system is needed. This paper focuses on the development of an intelligent control system which provides strategic resolutions for both vehicle routing and task dispatching. For vehicle routing, an algorithm to compute a real-time routing cost for finding the shortest distance between the tasks needs to be assigned. Two dispatching rules established on the real-time routing cost are proposed for flexible applications and comparison. A real case of a local company is adopted to verify our simulation model. The results have shown that our proposed framework outperforms the conventional nearest vehicle rule.

automated guided vehicle (AGV) routing, vehicle dispatching, intelligent control algorithm, simulation.