A THRESHOLD ACCEPTING ALGORITHM FOR PARTITIONING MACHINES IN A TANDEM AUTOMATED GUIDED VEHICLE

: a tandem automated guided vehicle (agv) system deals with grouping workstations into some non-overlapping zones, and assigning exactly one agv to each zone. this paper presents a new non-linear integer mathematical model to group n machines into n loops that minimizes both inter and intra-loop flows simultaneously. due to computational difficulties of exact methods in solving our proposed model, a threshold accepting (ta) algorithm is proposed. to show its efficiency, a number of instances generated randomly are solved by this proposed ta and then compared with the lingo solver package employing the branch-and-bound (b/b) method. the related computational results show that our proposed ta dominates the exact algorithm when the size of instances grows