Decentralized route choice control of automated baggage handling systems

Modern baggage handling processes in airports use destination coded vehicles (DCVs) to transport the luggage at high speeds. These vehicles transport the bags on a “mini” railway network. In order optimize the performance of a DCV-based baggage handling system, the route of each DCV has to be determined. In this paper we consider an event-based model of this system. For routing the DCVs through the network we propose decentralized control methods that independently compute local control actions viz. decentralized model predictive control (MPC) and decentralized heuristic approaches. The considered control methods are compared for several scenarios. Results indicate that decentralized MPC can be used to suboptimally solve the problem. Moreover, the decentralized heuristic approaches usually give worse results than those obtained when using decentralized MPC, but on the other hand they require very low computation time.