Smartness versus embeddability: a tradeoff for the deployment of smart AGVs in industry.

Summary In order to deploy AGVs in industry, it is mandatory to consider the tradeoff between the smartness and the embeddability. This paper aims to make the manufacturing research community more sensitive about this tradeoff and its consequences. Nowadays, AGVs are widely chosen by manufacturers to implement flexible material-handling systems which are necessary to cover the industrial requirements. However, many issues, presented in this paper, must be tackled to deploy these AGVs. A tradeoff-oriented procedure is proposed by considering these issues in flexible manufacturing system applications. Then, an approach is proposed to illustrate this procedure by providing simulation and experimental results. This approach is also used to roughly describe the smartness/embeddability tradeoff.