Energy efficient routing and task scheduling for autonomous transfer vehicles in intra logistics

Autonomous Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) are becoming increasingly prevalent in intra logistics. Industry 4.0 is bringing us closer to the efficient routing and scheduling of autonomous multi robot systems which perform transportation tasks. In this study, an energy efficient routing and scheduling system is proposed to minimize the total energy that the vehicles spend. Not only travelled distance but also the load of the vehicle is considered between two points. The routes of vehicles are obtained by using the proposed Hybrid Simulated Annealing Algorithm. An algorithm for the initial solution is also proposed for determining of the minimum number of vehicles for pickup and delivery requests. The performance of the algorithm is compared with the best solutions of the test problems in the literature. Besides, the proposed energy efficient routing and task scheduling model is compared with the classical distance model for routing and scheduling with backhauls. An analysis of trade-offs between energy and distance is proposed for intra logistics.