Dispatching of robots with shared resources
- arc welding (source: KuKa)
Description
Arc welding is a common technique in car manufactoring industry. Here, a robot is connected to a laser source supplying it with the necessary energy for the welding process. In principle such a laser source can supply up to six robots, but only one at a time. The goal is to find the minimum number of required laser source for a given cycle time.
Results
We have developed an optimization method which can solve instances of practical scales to proven optimality, i.e. exactly decide whether or no a a given number of laser sources is sufficient for the given cycle time. This method also directly includes collision avoidance into the optimization process.
Head
Member
Publications
C. Schwarz: Integrated Routing & Scheduling, phd thesis, available from Verlag Dr. Hut ISBN 978-3-8439-0310-3
J. Schauer, C.Schwarz, A generalized job-shop problem with more than one resource demand per task(Preprint)
J. Rambau, C. Schwarz: Exploiting combinatorial relaxations to solve a routing & scheduling problem in car body manufacturing (Preprint)
J. Rambau, C. Schwarz: How to avoid collisions in scheduling industrial robots? (Preprint)
J. Rambau, C. Schwarz: On the benefits of using NP-hard problems in Branch & Bound
(Operations Research Proceedings 2008, Springer, 2009, pp. 463-468)(Preprint)
