GA-based scheduling for transporting and manufacturing mobile robots in FMS

Abstract

With a high degree of flexibility and automation, flexible manufacturing system (FMS) consisting of a number of automatic machine tools and mobile robots is capable of coping with customized product requirements. In addition to transporting, mobile robots participate in processing some value-added operations on some specific machines such as pre-assembly or quality inspection if required. This paper presents a genetic algorithm to deal with the problem of sequencing of operations, routing of mobile robots, and operations assignment for mobile robots in FMS with the aim to minimize the makespan. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated by a generated numerical example.