Automatic guided vehicle system (AGVs) plays a vital role in material handling operations for a flexible manufacturing system (FMS).Optimum AGVs fleet size selection is one of the most sig-nificant decisions in effective design and control of automated material handling system. The fleet size estimation and optimization of AGVs requires an in-depth understanding of the various factors that AGVs in the FMS relies on. In this paper, an investigation for fleet size optimization of AGVs in different layouts of FMS by application of the analytical method and grey wolf optimization al-gorithm (GWO) is carried out. Layout design is one of the significant factors for optimization of AGV’s fleet size in any FMS. Results yield from analytical and grey wolf optimization algorithm are compared and validated for the different sizes of FMS layouts by computational experiments.

The real-time scheduling of automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) in flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is observed to be highly critical and complex due to the dynamic variations of production requirements such as an imbalance of AGVs loading, the high travel time of AGVs, variation in jobs, and AGV routes to name a few. The output from FMS considerably depends on the effi-cient scheduling of AGVs in the FMS. The multi-objective scheduling decisions for AGVs by nature inspired algorithms yield a considerable reduction throughput time in the FMS. In this paper, investigations are carried out for the multi-objective scheduling of AGVs to simultaneously balance the workload of AGVs and to minimize the travel time of AGVs in the FMS. The multi-objective scheduling is carried out by the application of nature-inspired grey wolf optimization algorithm (GWO) to yield a balanced workload for AGVs and also to minimize the travel time of AGVs simultaneously in the FMS. The output yield of the GWO algorithm is compared with the results of benchmark problems from the literature. The resulting yield of the proposed algorithm for the multi-objective scheduling of AGVs is observed to outperform the existing algorithms for scheduling of AGVs.

The simultaneous scheduling decisions between production systems and material handling systems are highly significant for a substantial reduction in makespan and improvement in throughput of flexible manufacturing system resources. In the absence of appropriate scheduling of production resources, the optimum utilization of FMS resources is not harnessed which turns into wastage of resources. In the present study, investigations are carried out for the sustainable multi-objective scheduling of automatic guided vehicle and flexible manufacturing system by the application of a grey wolf optimization algorithm (GWO). Initially the Giffler and Thompson (GT) algorithm [Giffler, B., & Thompson, G. L. (1960). Algorithms for solving production scheduling problems. Operations research, 8(4), 487-503.] along with four different priority hybrid dispatching rules (PHDRs) are applied for the development of the production center schedule thereafter the grey wolf optimization algorithm is applied for the yield of the sustainable multi-objective schedul-ing of automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) and the FMS together with an objective to minimize the total distance travel and number of backtracking of cruising automatic guided vehicle in the U type flexible manufacturing system facility. The applied methodology is evaluated by conducting computational experiments on a benchmark flexible manufacturing system configuration considered from the literature. The results obtained from the computational experiments clearly show that the proposed application of grey wolf optimization algorithm outperforms the other applied procedures in the literature.