The basic cyclic scheduling model for robotic flow shops

This paper analyzes the productivity of a robotic production cell, function ing under a repetitive robot move cycle. The cell is composed of m machines and one or several robot arms. Identical or different parts are entering t he cell during a robot cycle. The problem of cycle time evaluation is shown to be an instance of the basic cyclic scheduling problem. Thus, several po werful results previously developed in the cyclic scheduling context are us ed to analyze our problem, We propose a O (q . m(3)) algorithm to compute t he cycle time. The algorithm is first introduced for one-robot cells and th en extended to multi-robot cells. A dynamic programming algorithm is used t o find the optimal robot move cycle, that is, the cycle with minimum cycle time. Numerical results highlight the efficiency of cycle time evaluation m ethods and their potential practical utility in finding the optimal robot m ove cycle.