Abstract
Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) systems typically utilize a central controller to assign transportation tasks among vehicles. Because of their rigidity, centralized architectures are not suitable for modern manufacturing with its rapidly changing markets, demands for products with higher quality, smaller batch sizes, customer specifications, and shorter delivery times. This research applies concepts from Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) to develop a decentralized architecture for the coordinated control of AGVs. Simulation results compare the proposed method with the traditional centralized approach.