Abstract
Nowadays, automated guided vehicle (AGV) plays a significant role for manufacturing system. AGV system is not only imported in FMS, but also popular and promising in other fields. In general, material handling operations make up to nearly 20% to 50% of the overall operational costs (Tompkins et al., 2010). Thus, the proper assignation of material handling is strongly critical. Material handling system is non-value added process. However, it needs to wait at depot and head to the workstation for service as soon as the workstation process is complete so that the production system is fluent. If there are many workstation requiring the AGV to transport the products, it is necessary for AGV to plan an optimal route.so that AGV system can achieve the minimum cost under the environmental constraints. In this study, we study these issues incurred in the real-case factory. In order to minimize the total material handling cost, we focus on the suitable routing plan when lots of workstation are waiting for material handling simultaneously. In this study, we propose an AGVRPTW model which aims to minimize the material handling costs. However, due to the complexity, the above problem is a NP-Hard problem. In terms of saving solving time, this research is based on a Genetic Algorithm to develop a heuristic approach to find the near optimal solution. In this research, design of experiments (DOE) is adopted to validate the performance and analysis of variance (ANOVA) to evaluate the output.