A Software Tool for the Decentralized Control of AGV Systems

This paper presents a software tool for the simulation of a decentralized control strategy to assign tasks to Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGV) and coordinate their paths to avoid deadlock and collisions. We consider a zone-controlled guidepath network where a set of intelligent vehicles (agents) has to autonomously reach a consensus about the distribution of a set of tasks, i.e., a set of zones to be reached. To this aim, first the agents apply a discrete consensus algorithm in order to locally minimize the global cost for reaching the destination zone, then they move according to a decentralized coordination protocol that is based on a zone-controlled approach with the aim of avoiding deadlock and collisions. The software tool allows the user to define the guidepath network, then randomly generates the positions of AGVs and destinations and runs the two algorithms visually showing their behavior.