How to minimize cycle times of robot manufacturing systems

Abstract

Abstract The employment of industrial robot systems especially in the automotive industry noticeably changed the view of production plants and led to a tremendous increase in productivity. Nonetheless, rising technological complexity, the parallelization of production processes, as well as the crucial need for respecting specific safety issues pose new challenges for man and machine. Our goal is to develop algorithms, guidelines, and tools that make the commissioning of industrial robot systems more reliable by verifying the programs of robots and logical controllers. This in particular includes optimizing the schedule of the robot systems in order to ensure desired period times as well as conflict-free timetables already in the planning stage. The applicability of the Periodic Event Scheduling Problem proposed by Serafini and Ukovich (SIAM J Discrete Math 2(4):550–581, 1989) is investigated to tackle this cycle time minimization task, and we establish a variant of the classical formulation in order to cover the special characteristics of our scenario. We want to demonstrate how this key element forms a part of a range of developed software tools that support engineers and programmers throughout the commissioning of real-world robot production systems.