Pallet Location and Job Scheduling in a Twin-Robot System

Ollie Thomasson; Maria Battarra; Güneş Erdoğan; Gilbert Laporte

doi:10.1016/j.cor.2022.105956

Pallet Location and Job Scheduling in a Twin-Robot System

Ollie Thomasson, Maria Battarra, Güneş Erdoğan, Gilbert Laporte

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

This paper introduces the Twin-Robot Pallet Assignment and Scheduling Problem (TRPASP) in which two robots operating on a rail must be scheduled to pick up and deliver a set of products. The objective is to minimise the makespan, defined as the time taken for the robots to transfer all products from their pickup locations to their delivery locations, and return to their starting positions. Pickup locations are known a priori, while delivery locations must be assigned to minimise the makespan. The robots must respect a safety distance to avoid collisions. The paper presents a mathematical model for the TRPASP before introducing four heuristic algorithms for solving the problem. Computational experiments demonstrate that the best results are returned by a parallel hybrid metaheuristic.

Original language	English
Article number	105956
Journal	Computers and Operations Research
Volume	147
Early online date	22 Jul 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2022.105956
Publication status	Published - 30 Nov 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research made use of the Balena High Performance Computing (HPC) Service at the University of Bath. The work reported in this paper was undertaken as part of the Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation, at the University of Bath, University of Nottingham, and Loughborough University. The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Grant EP/V062042/1. Thanks are due to the referees for their valuable comments.

Funding Information:
This research made use of the Balena High Performance Computing (HPC) Service at the University of Bath. The work reported in this paper was undertaken as part of the Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation, at the University of Bath, University of Nottingham, and Loughborough University. The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Grant EP/V062042/1. Thanks are due to the referees for their valuable comments.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s)

Keywords

Genetic algorithms
Makespan
Metaheuristics
Palletising
Scheduling

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General Computer Science
Modelling and Simulation
Management Science and Operations Research

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10.1016/j.cor.2022.105956Licence: CC BY

Cite this

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title = "Pallet Location and Job Scheduling in a Twin-Robot System",

abstract = "This paper introduces the Twin-Robot Pallet Assignment and Scheduling Problem (TRPASP) in which two robots operating on a rail must be scheduled to pick up and deliver a set of products. The objective is to minimise the makespan, defined as the time taken for the robots to transfer all products from their pickup locations to their delivery locations, and return to their starting positions. Pickup locations are known a priori, while delivery locations must be assigned to minimise the makespan. The robots must respect a safety distance to avoid collisions. The paper presents a mathematical model for the TRPASP before introducing four heuristic algorithms for solving the problem. Computational experiments demonstrate that the best results are returned by a parallel hybrid metaheuristic.",

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Pallet Location and Job Scheduling in a Twin-Robot System

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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