Development of a simulation model for routing of automatic guided vehicles in flexible manufacturing system in the pharmaceutical industry
- The current trend of digitalization in the spirit of Industry 4.0 helps production systems to become more flexible day by day. Consequently, companies are adopting digital processes to increase flexibility and the performance of their manufacturing and logistic system because of increasing customer requirements.
Material handling is one of the main improvements of modern technologies, especially automated guided vehicles (AGVs). In the planning and implementation phase, companies attempt to predict the required AGVs based on internal experiences and recommendations of external actors which may lead to an inappropriate number of AGVs in the facility and cause high idle time or insufficient capacity of AGVs. Therefore, the main goal of this thesis is to create a model for the determination of the optimal number of AGVs and optimize the route planning for a given number of AGVs in the pharmaceutical industry.
