<strong>Integrated Planning and Scheduling in Fully Automatic Robotic Painting System</strong>

The process of painting is one of the production processes in the industry that automation is recently being developed. So far paint planning was one of the key issues in fully automatic robotic spray painting systems. However, generation of the precise spray painting paths is no longer sufficient to cope with high demands concerning painting quality and optimization of both the throughput and lateness in a spray painting systems consisting of more than one robot. In this context it is the planning and scheduling of painting tasks that affects the efficiency of painting process. Therefore the field that is currently in the interest of the industry and research is the integrated planning and scheduling in the fully automatic robots system. 

The main task of this Ph.D. thesis is to investigate these methods of planning and scheduling that can be applied to the automatic painting process performed by more than one robot and eventually design and solve an optimization model, with the objective of optimizing production throughput and lateness. The project is basically in the field of planning and scheduling, but requires deep understanding of painting processes and robotics. It includes development of a demo scheduler for Eco2Painter project, which is to be integrated with the existing software tool for automatic robotic painting, InropaBasic, and software for simulation of the robot motions, TUL. The main challenge of the project is in: scheduling the tasks that are not fully known, incorporating some of the experience of the painting operators to the model, capturing resource constrains, cycle time of the conveyor line and solving NP-hard problem, all made in multi-robots environment.

(Ewa Kolakowska, Department of Production, AAU)