Analysis of decision-making algorithm to operate an industrial grid conveying system

Purpose Conveyor systems which can serve only specific source-destination pairs are generally very rigid and not easily adaptable to serve new routes for new routing demands. The present work offers a formulation and solution for controlling a grid-like conveying system which is designed to adaptively serve any demand for routing between a source-destination where routes can be reconfigured. Design/methodology/approach Highly configurable conveying systems are critical in sorting or automated storage facilities. In such facilities, various items need to be sent from arbitrary sources to arbitrary destinations. This work uses reverse breadth first search (BFS) to find and maintain all the alternative paths in a grid graph (not just the shortest ones) in order to support routing in the grid. This also provides a degree of fault tolerance so that the conveying system can continue operating using alternative paths. With this approach it is not needed to run it repeatedly for every package to be conveyed. Findings This search algorithm does not only find the shortest paths within the grid, but it can successfully highlight the dexterity in the grid and allow for the expression of reachability to be updated to eliminate all paths that contain failing nodes. Originality/value This work contributes a conveyor grid design consisting of an acyclic grid, the analysis, determination of paths using reverse BFS and the method for managing the routing while providing a degree of fault tolerance.