Track: Manufacturing

Abstract

There is no doubt that during the last decade businesses adopt Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) technology in their entire supply chain network. In order to operate the AGVs inside warehouses and provide high accuracy, efficiency, and sustainable solutions, it is necessary to decide on the essential current key insights and elements of AGVs, which can give a clear direction for the warehousing and supply chain managers. Hence this study aims to explore and analyse the current  trends, developments and impacts of the AGVs on the warehousing design and day-to-day operations and discuss whether these key insights have received sufficient research studies and whether this can lead to new opportunities in the future. The study conducts a systematic literature review to demonstrate the whole process in a structured way of how the author identified the key journal papers for further analysis. The findings revealed that the current  trends of AGVs are mainly about flexible/smart manufacturing processes, the human-machine collaboration in dynamic environments, the scheduling and routing algorithms of the AGVs and the integration between RFID technology and AGVs in warehouses. Additionally, the findings also showed that the main impacts of AGVs in warehousing design are mostly about sustainability, employment, and reshoring-nearshoring decisions.