An almost time optimal route planning method for complex manufacturing topologies

Abstract

This paper focuses on time and distance optimal route planning for complex manufacturing topologies. The main idea of the proposed algorithm is to transform the manufacturing process into an undirected weighted graph, which can be treated as the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The optimal solution for the TSP is found with the help of Linear Integer Programming, which yields to Nondeterministic Polynomial-time (NP-hard). In order to overcome unpractical computation times for more complex tasks the optimal solution is approximated with the help of the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) algorithm and alternatively with the Christofides algorithm. Simulation results and a comparison of the denoted methods are shown.