Technologies such as Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and the Internet of Things (IoT) increasingly disrupt traditional manufacturing and production systems. However, there is a scarcity of empirical studies synthesising and evaluating the impact of disruptive technologies on existing manufacturing systems. This study examines the impact of AGVs applying IoT on Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) through a case study demonstrating the integration of AGVs with IoT in a manufacturing company. As a concept, FMS was conceived decades ago; this study uses socio-technical systems theory to elaborate the concept of FMS into the current context. Key themes uncovered from the literature review include (i) AGVs in warehouse systems, (ii) AGV scheduling and routing, (iii) Human-machine interface, and (iv) integrating and controlling AGVs/IoT. The case study demonstrates how AGVs can create smart, flexible manufacturing systems by taking the following steps: (a) problem identification, (b) performance measurement, (c) designing the proposed solution, (d) evaluate IoT systems, (e) implementation of the new solution, and (f) future improvements. The study concludes with specific recommendations to implement Industry 4.0 in manufacturing companies.

Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) is the world's longest established OR journal and an official journal of The OR Society. It is the aim of the Journal to present papers which are relevant to practitioners, researchers, teachers, students and consumers of operational research, and which cover the theory, practice, history or methodology of OR.

This paper presents an arc-guided evolutionary algorithm for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows, which is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem that addresses the service of a set of customers using a homogeneous fleet of capacitated vehicles within fixed time intervals. The objective is to minimize the fleet size following routes of minimum distance. The proposed method evolves a population of mu individuals on the basis of an (mu + lambda) evolution strategy; at each generation, a new intermediate population of lambda individuals is generated, using a discrete arc-based representation combined with a binary vector of strategy parameters. Each offspring is produced via mutation out of arcs extracted from parent individuals. The selection of arcs is dictated by the strategy parameters and is based on their frequency of appearance and the diversity of the population. A multiparent recombination operator enables the self-adaptation of the strategy parameters, while each offspring is further improved via novel memory-based trajectory local search algorithms. For the selection of survivors, a deterministic scheme is followed. Experimental results on well-known large-scale benchmark datasets of the literature demonstrate the competitiveness of the proposed method.