Controllers Design for the Multi-Shuttle and Multi-Station Transportation System

Nowadays, the Multi-Shuttle and Multi-Station Transportation System (MMTS) is one of the most interesting research topics in many fields of industries. It is an effective solution to reduce unexpected accidents that occur during transportation as well as increase productivity in manufacturing. The aim of this paper is to introduce the controller design for the MMTS which is built in our BK-Recme BioMech Lab at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (VNU-HCM), Viet Nam. Based on the design of this system, the control algorithms will be conducted to check the operation of the whole system. To evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of this model, we design a series of random instances for different quantities of nodes as well as the different quantities of shuttles. Our system includes 4 stations and 6 shuttles which are assembled in the serial chain system. However, the number of stations and number of shuttles can be expanded to any desired ones which are based on the requirement of the industries. In this paper, we mainly focus on the controller design of this system to make it operate in an effective way that the goods will be transported and delivered to the target station as fast as possible. In order to solve the large-scale instances and realistic transport problems, we propose three algorithms for three progresses as shuttles calling, path reading and shuttles communicating. The shuttles calling is to decide which shuttle should be called to the start-node. Path reading to determine the shortest way to go from start-node to end-node. Finally, shuttles communicating, which allow one shuttle to interact with the next shuttles so we have a loop of orders (shuttle 1 to shuttle 2;shuttle 2 to shuttle 3;etc.;shuttle n-1 to shuttle n). This proposes solution can help us to solve the huge numbers of shuttles and stations in the system. The specific result of this study is applying Dijkstra’s algorithm to propose an algorithm that allows handling a transportation system without caring about the number of shuttles as well as the number of stations for the closed-loop path. Several test problems are carried out in order to check the feasibility and the effectiveness of our purposed control algorithm.