TY - JOUR
T1 - Cyclic scheduling of parts and robot moves in m-machine robotic cells
AU - Gultekin, Hakan
AU - Coban, Betul
AU - Akhlaghi, Vahid Eghbal
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors are grateful to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that have improved earlier versions of this paper. This research is supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey under grant # 213M435 .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2018/2
Y1 - 2018/2
N2 - We consider a flow shop type manufacturing cell consisting of m machines and a material handling robot producing multiple parts. The robot transfers the parts between the machines and loads/unloads the machines. We consider the cyclic scheduling of the parts and the robot moves with the objective of maximizing the throughput rate. We develop a mixed integer linear programming formulation of the problem. The formulation is improved with several valid inequalities and reformulations of the constraints. We also develop a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm for this strongly NP-Hard problem. The algorithm is modified to handle both 1-unit and multi-unit robot cycles. Multi-threading is used to parallelize the algorithm in order to improve its efficiency. After calibrating the parameters of the heuristic algorithm, an extensive computational study is performed to evaluate its performance. The results of this study revealed that the developed heuristic provides near-optimal solutions in reasonable solution times. The effects of parallelization and the benefits of considering multi-unit cycles instead of 1-unit cycles are also quantified. Our computational tests show that multi-unit cycles improve the throughput rate by 9% on the average. The improvement can reach to 20% depending on the problem parameters.
AB - We consider a flow shop type manufacturing cell consisting of m machines and a material handling robot producing multiple parts. The robot transfers the parts between the machines and loads/unloads the machines. We consider the cyclic scheduling of the parts and the robot moves with the objective of maximizing the throughput rate. We develop a mixed integer linear programming formulation of the problem. The formulation is improved with several valid inequalities and reformulations of the constraints. We also develop a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm for this strongly NP-Hard problem. The algorithm is modified to handle both 1-unit and multi-unit robot cycles. Multi-threading is used to parallelize the algorithm in order to improve its efficiency. After calibrating the parameters of the heuristic algorithm, an extensive computational study is performed to evaluate its performance. The results of this study revealed that the developed heuristic provides near-optimal solutions in reasonable solution times. The effects of parallelization and the benefits of considering multi-unit cycles instead of 1-unit cycles are also quantified. Our computational tests show that multi-unit cycles improve the throughput rate by 9% on the average. The improvement can reach to 20% depending on the problem parameters.
KW - Hybrid metaheuristic
KW - Mixed integer linear programming formulation
KW - Multiple parts
KW - Robotic cell scheduling
KW - Throughput maximization
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85030097791&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85030097791&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cor.2017.09.018
DO - 10.1016/j.cor.2017.09.018
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85030097791
SN - 0305-0548
VL - 90
SP - 161
EP - 172
JO - Computers and Operations Research
JF - Computers and Operations Research
ER -