Development and evaluation of dispatching strategies for the IPSI™ AGV system

Abstract: Container Terminals are experiencing increased pressure to raise their productivity levels and capacity, in order to handle the increasing amounts of container cargo due to globalization. Due to space restrictions and other financial factors, automated solutions have been developed. AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) are one of those automated solutions for the horizontal transportation with in a Container Terminal. A recent European sponsored project has lead to the development of a new generation of AGVs that are using cassettes namely IPSI™ AGVs. An agent-based simulator has been developed with the purpose of constructing and evaluating dispatching strategies for this new developed AGV system. Already explored dispatching strategies [9, 14] are used with additional modifications to re-evaluate them with the consideration of the usage of cassettes. Our findings from the simulation experiment are suggesting that a cost estimation based approach is much more suited than an inventory based. In addition to that, the results are very convincing in that the number of cassettes used is the most dominate factor despite dispatching strategy for obtaining a fast ship turnaround time.