A market-based approach for dynamic vehicle deployment planning using radio frequency identification (RFID) information

Recently active radio-frequency identification (RFID) has drawn a lot of attention because of its capability to provide visibility of a dynamically moving object in a constantly changing operational environment by enabling instant identification and automatic information transfer. When a vehicle moves around in an automotive manufacturing plant shipment yard, the RFID system keeps track of the vehicle's location in near real-time until it is shipped to a dealer. These real-time location data from the RFID can be utilized to make a better decision to deploy a finished vehicle to a parking slot in the shipment yard. This paper presents an approach for RFID-enabled finished vehicle deployment planning, which is based on market-based decision-making framework having a multiagent computational architecture to process and coordinate real-time changes in vehicle locations and make a timely decision. Experimental results using simulation show that the proposed vehicle deployment planning approach improves a great deal of vehicle deployment performance in terms of the operational time, shipment yard utilization, and labor consumption. Published by Elsevier B.V.