Distributed route choice control in DCV-based baggage handling systems

Reference:
A.N. Tarau, B. De Schutter, and H. Hellendoorn, "Distributed route choice control in DCV-based baggage handling systems," Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Control Applications, Saint Petersburg, Russia, pp. 818-824, July 2009.

Abstract:
In this paper we develop advanced control methods for routing individual vehicles which ensure automatic transportation of bags in a baggage handling system of an airport. In particular we consider distributed model predictive control and a distributed heuristic control approach. The baggage handling system performs efficiently if all the bags are transported to the corresponding end points within a specific time window, and this makes the process of handling baggage time-critical. The proposed control approaches are effective for the given application. To assess their performance we consider a benchmark case study, in which the methods are compared for several scenarios. Results indicate that the distributed approaches improve the performance of the vehicle-based baggage handling system with up to 20%.