How to instruct AGV to stay /travel to park points if there is no work

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Ajay M asked Feb 11 2023 at 5:14 PM Ajay M edited Feb 14 2023 at 9:18 AM

How to instruct AGV to stay /travel to park points if there is no work

Hello Everyone,

When there are no objects to pick up or drop off, the AGV continues to loop or travel in search of work. This is a problem that I'm attempting to fix. As tracking the empty travel metric has been restricted due to the AGV's looping/unnecessary travel. Therefore, the dash board's pie chart indicates that the vehicle is moving more than 50 KM (or 50000m) every day, which isn't practical. So it may be somewhat realistic if the AGV Empty travel is simply for collecting or returning to its park position.

How can the problem of unnecessary travel, job searching, or looping be resolved when there is nothing to pick up or leave off?

I am using standard AGV process flow template to instruct AGV to pick or drop items.

Any Suggestion or help?

Software Version:

FlexSim 22.2.1

agv empty travel

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Jason Lightfoot ♦♦ commented · Feb 11 2023 at 11:13 PM

Which template and have you added parking points?

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1676157127264.png (6.5 KiB)

Ajay M Jason Lightfoot ♦♦ commented · Feb 12 2023 at 8:23 AM

@Jason Lightfoot Thankyou for the response. In my model I am using Advanced AGV template and park points are also assigned to AGV network or path

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Felix Möhlmann Ajay M commented · Feb 12 2023 at 9:04 AM

Is the control point that the parking points are connected to part of the NextWorkPoint loop? Because an AGV has to acutally pass that point in order to "see" the park point and check whether it should park or continue to travel.

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Answer 1 · 2023-02-12T13:07:00Z

Jason Lightfoot answered Feb 12 2023 at 1:07 PM Ajay M edited Feb 14 2023 at 9:18 AM

You'll need to push to the AGV work list using a partition that matches one referenced by the initial pull in the "Work Generation" section of the process flow. Use something that identifies the circuit for the partition - that could be an AGV, fixed resource or just a numeric value.

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Emily K commented · Feb 13 2023 at 8:29 AM

@Ajay M Maybe this answer will help.

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Ajay M Emily K commented · Feb 14 2023 at 9:17 AM

@Emily K Thank you for the Suggestion!

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Ajay M commented · Feb 13 2023 at 8:38 AM

@Jason Lightfoot Your suggestion was efficient and Thankyou very much and the AGV's empty travel was somewhat reduced.

However, there is one additional problem that I've noticed: the AGV takes a long route even the pickup points close to its prior dropoff point. You can see an example of this in the image below. The blue-circled object is the one that the AGV will pick up. The red line indicates what appears to be the quickest route between an AGV's current position and the pickup location. The AGV appears to be following this path, which is black, rather than the red one, which is the shortest. Regarding other pickup and drop-off locations, I discovered this problem as well.

One more issue i found was even dropping off the items to a particular dropoffpoint still AGV is not taking a shortest path to its parking position.

Any Suggestion Please?

here is the working model Empty travel issue2.fsm

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1676276792238.png (112.0 KiB)

empty-travel-issue2.fsm (1.3 MiB)

Felix Möhlmann Ajay M commented · Feb 13 2023 at 9:20 AM

The AGV Process Flow templates are meant to mimic a specific kind of task distribution logic. They work by sending the AGVs along the NextWorkPoint loop. At every point, it will check if there is something to pick up (or drop off, or if the AGV should park or charge, ...).

The only exception to this is that the AGV will travel directly to an unload destination if loading an item caused it to reach its maximum load capacity.

If your goal is to just move directly from location to location, without any preset "patrolling" route, then you can achieve this with a very simple process flow.

SimpleAGVFlow_fm.fsm

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1676279368079.png (36.7 KiB)

simpleagvflow-fm.fsm (42.8 KiB)

Jason Lightfoot ♦♦ Felix Möhlmann commented · Feb 13 2023 at 9:41 AM

For which you'll likely need to partition the park points list too.

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How to instruct AGV to stay /travel to park points if there is no work

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