Production scheduling in a reconfigurable manufacturing system benefiting from human-robot collaboration

Abstract

Nowadays, the manufacturing sector needs higher levels of flexibility to confront the extremely volatile market. Accordingly, exploiting both machine and workforce reconfigurability as two critical sources of flexibility is advantageous. In this regard, for the first time, this paper explores an integrated production scheduling and workforce planning problem in a Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) benefiting from reconfigurable machines and human-robot collaboration. A new Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model and an efficient Constraint Programming (CP) model are developed to formulate the problem, minimising the makespan as the performance metric. Due to the high complexity of the problem, the MILP model cannot handle large-sized instances. Hence, to evaluate the performance of the CP model in large-sized instances, a lower bound is derived based on the relaxation of the problem. Finally, extensive computational experiments are carried out to assess the performance of the devised MILP and CP models and provide general recommendations for managers dealing with such a complex problem. The results reveal the superiority of the CP model over the MILP model in small- and medium-sized instances. Moreover, the CP model can find high-quality solutions for large-sized instances within a reasonable computational time.

KEYWORDS:

• Reconfigurable manufacturing system
• scheduling
• workforce planning
• human-robot collaboration
• constraint programming

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund under the project AI&Reasoning (reg. no. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000466).

Notes on contributors

Behdin Vahedi-Nouri

Behdin Vahedi-Nouri is a researcher at Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics, and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague. He received his Ph.D., M.Sc., and B.Sc. degrees in Industrial Engineering from University of Tehran, Bu-Ali Sina University, and Iran University of Science and Technology, respectively. His research focuses on manufacturing and healthcare systems scheduling, logistics optimisation, and applied operations research. He has published several papers in reputable international journals and conferences.

Reza Tavakkoli-Moghaddam

Reza Tavakkoli-Moghaddam is a Professor of Industrial Engineering at the College of Engineering, University of Tehran in Iran. He obtained his Ph.D., M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Industrial Engineering from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne (1998), University of Melbourne in Melbourne (1994), and Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran (1989), respectively. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the “Advances in Industrial Engineering” journal published by the University of Tehran and the Editorial Board member of nine reputable academic journals. He is the recipient of the 2009 and 2011 Distinguished Researcher Awards and the 2010 and 2014 Distinguished Applied Research Awards at University of Tehran, Iran. He has been selected as the National Iranian Distinguished Researcher in 2008 and 2010 by the MSRT (Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology) in Iran. He has obtained the outstanding rank as the top 1% scientist and researcher in the world elite group since 2014. Also, he received the Order of Academic Palms Award as a distinguished educator and scholar for the insignia of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques by the Ministry of National Education of France in 2019. He has published 5 books, 37 book chapters, and more than 1000 journal and conference papers.

Zdeněk Hanzálek

Zdeněk Hanzálek received his Ph.D. degree in Industrial Informatics from the Universite Paul Sabatier Toulouse, France, and the Ph.D. degree in Control Engineering from the Czech Technical University (CTU) in Prague. He was with LAAS Toulouse, and with INPG Grenoble. Besides this, Zdenek founded and led the SW development team of the Porsche Engineering Services in Prague and further he founded Merica company dealing with production scheduling. Currently, he is a professor at CTU Prague, leading a group of 20 talented researchers and Ph.D. students. His research interests include production scheduling and combinatorial optimization. He is author or co-author of 58 journal papers and 100 conference papers.

Alexandre Dolgui

Alexandre Dolgui is an IISE Fellow, Distinguished Professor, and the Head of Automation, Production and Computer Sciences Department at the IMT Atlantique, France. His research focuses on manufacturing line design, production planning and supply chain optimisation. His main results are based on the exact mathematical programming methods and their intelligent coupling with heuristics and metaheuristics algorithms. He is the co-author of 5 books, the co-editor of 20 books or conference proceedings, the author of 253 refereed journal papers, 30 editorials and 31 book chapters. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Production Research (IJPR).