Scheduling multiple robots in a no-wait re-entrant robotic flowshop

Ada Che, Michelle Chabrol, Michel Gourgand, Yuan Wang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

35 Scopus citations

Abstract

No-wait re-entrant robotic flowshops are widely used in the electronic industry, such as PCB and semiconductor manufacturing. In such an industry, cyclic production policy is often used due to large lot size and simplicity of implementation. This paper addresses cyclic scheduling of a no-wait re-entrant robotic flowshop with multiple robots for material handling. We formulate the problem and propose a polynomial algorithm to find the minimum number of robots for all feasible cycle times. Consequently, the minimum cycle time for any given number of robots can be obtained with the proposed algorithm. The algorithm runs in O(N5) time in the worst case, where N is the number of machines in the robotic flowshop.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)199-208
Number of pages10
JournalInternational Journal of Production Economics
Volume135
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2012

Keywords

  • Multiple robots
  • No-wait
  • Polynomial algorithm
  • Robotic flowshop
  • Scheduling

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