Optimization of AGV Dispatching Based on Petri Net Towards Smart Manufacturing System

As the key technique of smart manufacturing, Automated Guided Vehicles(AGV) are widely adopted in automatic material handling systems. How to dispatch AGVs for material distribution so as to support better production has always been a problem for smart factories as there might be different complex constraints in a real practical manufacturing environment. Petri Nets as a powerful system modeling tool is capable to demonstrate the discrete states/events in real systems. Therefore, a Petri net model is established in this paper to describe the workshop production process with AGVs for material delivery, and Platform Independent Petri Net Editor(PIPE) is used to analyze the resource changes via simulation analysis. The invariant analysis is adopted to represent structure characteristics, combined with the simulation result from PIPE, resource utilization can be obtained and a reconfiguration of AGVs will also be suggested. Finally, based on improved AGV configuration the dispatching scheduling is provided.