An Approach to Decentralized Conflict Avoidance for Transportation Vehicles with Path-free Navigation

Routing of multiple free ranging transportation vehicles is a complex task. All vehicles simply using the shortest possible way may lead to a lot of routing conflicts. The offline definition of a set of rules that influence the vehicles choice for a specific route can lead to longer travel distances but shorter travel times. This publication presents and discusses multiple approaches for defining such a priori rules. The approaches range from a core manual planning procedure to an automatic algorithm. A simulation model proves in a basic case study the impact of applying such rules on the systems’ performance.