Scheduling a Single Mobile Robot for Feeding Tasks in a Manufacturing Cell

This paper deals with the problem of finding optimal feeding sequence in a manufacturing cell with feeders fed by a mobile robot with manipulation arm. The performance criterion is to minimize total traveling time of the robot in a given planning horizon. Besides, the robot has to be scheduled in order to keep production lines within the cell working without any shortage of parts fed from feeders. A mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to find the optimal solution for the problem. In the MILP formulation, a method of maximum and minimum levels for feeders, inspired by the (s, Q) inventory system, is applied to define time window for each feeding task. A case study is implemented at the impeller production line to demonstrate the result of the proposed MILP model.