A Dynamic Scheduling Method for Logistics Tasks Oriented to Intelligent Manufacturing Workshop

Aiming at the logistics dynamic scheduling problem in an intelligent manufacturing workshop (IMW), an intelligent logistics scheduling model and response method with Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) based on the mode of “request-scheduling-response” were proposed, and they were integrated with Internet of Things (IoT) to meet the demands of dynamic and real time. Correspondingly, a mathematical model was developed and integrated with a double-level hybrid genetic algorithm and ant colony optimization (DLH-GA-ACO) to minimize the finish time with the minimum AGVs and limited time. The mathematical model optimized the logistics scheduling process on two dimensions which include the sequence of tasks assigned to an AGV and the matching relation between transfer tasks and AGVs (AGV-task). The effectiveness of the model was verified by a set of experiments, and comparison among DLH-GA-ACO, hybrid genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization (H-GA-PSO), and tabu search algorithm (TSA) was performed. In the experiments, the DLH-GA-ACO ran in a distributed environment for a faster computing speed. According to the comparisons, the superiority and effectiveness of DLH-GA-ACO on dynamic simultaneous scheduling problem were proved and the intelligent logistics scheduling model was also proved to be an effective model.