The effect of AGVs number on a flexible manufacturing system

There are generally ten (10) common forms of flexibilities involved in Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS), and material handling flexibility is one of them. Implementing an FMS with many Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) allows the system to increase productivity by choosing the appropriate AGV to handle transportation for processing parts between different workstations. In this paper, we study the effect of increasing the number of AGVs in the system on the performances of Flexible Manufacturing System. The performances considered are Productivity, Makespan, Waiting for Process Time and Waiting for Transport Time.