Expert Systems with Applications

This paper addresses a new multiple automatic guided vehicle dispatching problem (AGVDP) from material handling process in a matrix manufacturing workshop. The problem aims to determine a solution with the objective of minimizing the transportation cost including travel cost, penalty cost for violating time and AGV cost. For this purpose, a mixed integer linear programming model is first formulated based on a comprehensive investigation. Then, a discrete artificial bee colony algorithm (DABC) is presented together with some novel and advanced techniques for solving the problem. In the proposed DABC algorithm, a nearest-neighbor-based heuristic based on the problem-specific characteristics is presented to generate an initial solution with a high level of quality. Five effective neighborhood operators are presented to generated neighboring solutions with a high level of diversity. Four theorems are proposed to avoid the unfeasible solutions generated by the neighborhood operators. Two new control parameters are introduced. One is to balance the global exploration and local exploitation in employed bee and onlooker bee phases. The other is to enhance the local exploitation capability of the neighborhood operators. Besides, an insertion-based local search method is provided for the scout bee phase to lead the algorithm to a promising region of the solution space. A comprehensive and thorough evaluation with 110 instances collected from a real-world factory shows that the presented algorithm produces superior results which are also demonstrated to be statistically significant than the existing algorithms in the close related literature.

An effective discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for multi-AGVs dispatching problem in a matrix manufacturing workshop