Article Transport Path Selection for Congestion-Balanced Routing
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Solution Overview
Problem
In article transport facilities, when multiple transport vehicles select the path with the lowest possible cost, they often concentrate on a particular path, leading to increased congestion and longer transport times, resulting in decreased overall facility efficiency.
Innovation Solution
A control system that derives predicted transport times for multiple candidate paths and selects paths within a reference range including the average transport time, equalizing transport times across vehicles to suppress efficiency loss.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of time
If all transport vehicles select the path with the lowest possible cost, then individual transport time is minimized, but congestion increases causing overall transport efficiency to decrease
Solution Approach 1:
The control system changes the path selection parameter from purely minimizing individual transport time to selecting paths whose predicted transport time falls within a reference range centered on the average transport time. This parameter change balances individual vehicle efficiency with overall system throughput by preventing congestion on any single path while maintaining reasonable transport times for each vehicle.
2Ease of operation
If transport vehicles concentrate on a particular main path, then path selection simplicity is improved, but congestion and transport time increase
Solution Approach 1:
The control system implements feedback by continuously monitoring the predicted transport time for each candidate path and comparing it against the reference range derived from average transport times. This feedback mechanism dynamically guides path selection to distribute vehicles across multiple paths, preventing congestion while maintaining operational simplicity through automated control.
3Productivity
If the control system equalizes transport times across all vehicles, then overall facility efficiency is maintained, but path selection complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The control system performs preliminary action by pre-calculating the reference range based on average transport times before making path selection decisions. This preliminary computation simplifies the real-time path selection process, as the system only needs to compare predicted transport times against the pre-established reference range rather than performing complex optimization calculations during vehicle dispatch.
Data Source
AI summary
An article transport facility includes a control system that issues a transport command specifying a transport origin and a transport destination of an article to a transport vehicle. The control system is configured to execute predicted transport time derivation processing for deriving a predicted transport time for each of a plurality of candidate paths, and path selection processing for selecting a transport path for the transport vehicle to travel along from among the plurality of candidate paths. The control system preferentially selects a candidate path whose predicted transport time is within a reference range as the transport path in path selection processing regarding the candidate paths with a target transport destination as the transport destination.