KNOWLEDGE BASED AND CLP-DRIVEN APPROACH TO AGVs SYSTEM CONTROL

The subject matter of the study are the automated guided vehicle (AGV) operation synchronisation mechanisms in flexible manufacturing systems, enabling determination of the travel schedules via some preset travelling route intervals. In many practical cases transport operations are repetitive. For this type of systems the transport processes can be modelled as a system of cyclic concurrent processes sharing common resources with mutual exclusion. The processes examination has to guarantee the collision-free and deadlock free AGVs flow. In this paper the problem of determination of the rules coordinating access of the vehicles to the shared travel route intervals, ensuring the collision-free and deadlock-free execution of the repetitive processes was reduced to determination of the sufficient conditions. In particular the problem of searching for a pair is defined in the form of the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) and is solved with use of the logic programming techniques.