Scheduling a single mobile robot for part-feeding tasks of production lines

This study deals with the problem of sequencing feeding tasks of a single mobile robot which is able to provide parts for feeders of machines on production lines. The mobile robot has to be scheduled in order to stoppage from lack of parts in the production line. A method based on the characteristics of feeders and inspired by the ( s,Q ) inventory system, is thus applied to define time windows for the feeding tasks of the robot. The capacity of the robot is also taken into consideration. The performance criterion is to minimize total traveling time of the robot for a given planning horizon. A genetic algorithm-based heuristics is presented which results in a significant increase in the speed of finding near-optimal solutions. To evaluate the performance of the genetic algorithm-based heuristic, a mixed-integer programming model has been developed for the problem. A case study is implemented at an impeller production line in a real factory and computational experiments are also conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.