ROBOT TASK SCHEDULING IN A FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING CELL

Effective sequencing and scheduling of the material handling system can have a major impact on the productivity of the manufacturing system. This is especially true in the case where material handling times are on par with machine processing times. In a dynamic, real-time environment, the optimal solution of this scheduling problem may be computationally infeasible. In this paper, we develop a branch and bound approach which is coupled with quick, effective bounds to optimize the movement of a robot which serves the material handling requirements within a manufacturing cell. Computational results are given which explore the tradeoff between computation time and deviation from optimal for different scenarios.