Towards energy-aware operational decisions for automated guided vehicles: A review

Authors: KyuJin Kyung, GaHyun Lee, SeongJae Chu, Joseph John Cherukara, SVSLN Surya Suhas Vaddhiparthy, Tanniru Abhinav Siddharth, Deepak Gangadharan, BaekGyu Kim
Status: Final
Date of publication: 25 June 2025
Published in: ITU Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies, Volume 6 (2025), Issue 2, Pages 132-148
Article DOI : https://doi.org/10.52953/WBBM2991

Abstract:
Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are widely used for material handling across various industries, such as warehouses, manufacturing plants, and automated container terminals. As AGVs are battery-powered, it is necessary to schedule AGV's tasks considering energy-related aspects. That is, understanding how an AGV's energy is consumed or recharged in a given operational environment is crucial to optimizing both operational efficiency and energy consumption. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of energy-aware AGV operations, emphasizing three critical areas: the impact of the operational environment, energy consumption modeling, and energy-aware decision-making for scheduling and path planning. This article examines the layout structures and energy supply strategies in two different environments: automated container terminals and workshops, to understand the environmental impact on AGV energy efficiency. A comprehensive review of energy consumption models provides insight into the physical characteristics of AGVs' energy consumption. Finally, we provide variations of task scheduling and path planning problems that explicitly take into account such energy aspects and introduce how literature tackles to solve those problems.

Keywords: AGV Scheduling, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), battery management, energy consumption modeling, energy efficiency, optimization, path planning
Rights: © International Telecommunication Union, available under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO license.