Simulation analysis of AGV system performance in container port terminals

A key issue in automated seaport container terminals is the assignment of transportation orders to automated guided vehicles (AGVs). This paper adapts some of the priority rule based approaches known from manufacturing and warehouse applications to cover specific features arising in seaport container terminals. In addition, extended priority rule based dispatching heuristics are proposed, which exploit the capability of the AGVs of carrying one 40 ft or two 20 ft containers at a time. In a simulation study, the performance of these heuristics is compared against a more elaborative pattern based heuristic dispatching algorithm which has been developed by the authors. The latter one can be regarded as an off-line approach, since a complete tour covering a number of pick-up and drop-off operations is generated for each vehicle getting available during a given look-ahead horizon.