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This paper explores deep into the collaborative scheduling of common rail dual automatic guided vehicles (AGVs). Firstly, a dual AGV scheduling model was constructed to minimize the overall time of material distribution. Then, a novel scheduling algorithm was developed to dynamically plan the orders based on time windows. To effectively minimize the distribution time, heuristic algorithms were adopted to initialize the distribution order of materials. On this basis, the collaboration between the two AGVs was innovatively designed based on dynamic planning and time windows, making up for the defects of traditional methods in AGV cooperation. This greatly shortens the running time of the entire system in material distribution. The computing results fully demonstrate the efficiency and rationality of our algorithm. Finally, our algorithm was proved to be superior to the benchmark method through experiments on actual industrial instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the scheduling of Electrical Multiple Units (EMUs) under the condition of their utilization on one sector or within several interacting sectors. Based on the introduction of the train connection graph which describes the possible connection relationship between trains, the integer programming model of EMU circulation planning is constructed. In order to analyzing the resolution of the model, a heuristic which shares the characteristics with the existing methods is introduced first. This method consists of two stages: one is a greedy strategy to construct a feasible circulation plan fragment, and another is to apply a stochastic disturbance to it to generate a whole feasible solution or get a new feasible solution. Then, an exact branch and bound method which is based on graph designing is proposed. Due to the complexity, the lower bound is computed through a polynomial approximation algorithm which is a modification from the one solving the degree constraint minimum 1-tree problem. Then, a branching strategy is designed to cope with the maintenance constraints. Finally, we report extensive computational results on a railway corridor in which the sectors possess the basic feature of railway networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]