In order to implement an effective (re-)planning strategy for the AGVs, in the last two months a measure of efficiency has been implemented. Given a set of paths for the vehicles, this measure evaluates the efficiency both in terms of the traffic that can be generated and in terms of the lengths of the paths: the lower the measure the better the paths. The planning strategy that will be developed will look for set of paths minimizing this measure.

In parallel,  an area for hosting the arena, a small scale automatic warehouse where to carry on the experimental validation in the last part of TRAFCON, has been individuated. The area is 400 m2 wide and the preliminary design and construction of the arena have started.

The last two months of Task 1 have been devoted to the development of a coordination strategy for efficiently solving the coordination problem in a realistic setting. The coordination of the AGVs and the constraints due to the control architecture of Elettric80 have been represented using extended coordination diagrams. In this way, the coordination problem has been transformed into a simpler planning problem in the coordination diagram. A scalable incremental planning algorithm that efficiently solves the coordination among the AGVs has been developed. The validity of the proposed strategy has been shown through simulations over a real plant and comparative analysis with the strategy currently used in Elettric80.

Task 1 is devoted to the formalization of a real-world traffic control problem for AGVs circulating in an automatic warehouse and on the development of an efficient coordination strategy. In the first months of TRAFCON the traffic control problem has been mathematically formalized and the requirements that need to be satisfied have been defined. Furthermore, the coordination diagram, used for multi-robot coordination, has been extended for being adopted for modeling the problem of AGVs coordination. Finally a simulator that can reproduce the motion of a set of AGVs over a layout of a warehouse has been developed.