Application of Swarm Intelligence for Automated Guided Vehicle Systems

Due to the increased individualization of customer demands in the last 20 years, the production systems are required to be more flexible and scalable. It is the samefor the material flow system with automated guided vehicles (AGVs). To realize the flexibility and scalability, it is recommended to decentralized control the vehicles. As an attempt, a concept of swarm intelligence with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is proposed and introduced in this article. The concept is supposed to be used for automated guided vehicle systems in which objects have to be transported from place to place. Therefore the object has to be self-organized and has to manage its own transport. In this context the vehicles have to choose the most optimal transportation. Swarm intelligence is a topic which deserves a high level of attention as a method to realize high flexibility and scalability.