An effective chemical reaction optimization for cyclic multi-type parts robotic cell scheduling problem with blocking

Abstract

The scheduling problem of cyclic multi-type parts robotic cell with blocking is studied in this paper. For simultaneously optimizing robotic move sequence and part input sequence, an effective chemical reaction optimization (ECRO) is proposed. In ECRO, a new encoding method, robotic activity encoding, is shown for transferring double sequence into single sequence. To construct feasible solution, a novel rule, order insertion (OI) rule, is presented. To obtain initial population more effectively, insertion robotic activity method (IRAM) is firstly addressed. What’s more, for enhancing the efficiency of ECRO, elementary reaction operators are designed according to properties of feasible solutions. From the simulation results, compare to stochastic generated solution method (SGSM), IRAM is outstanding. The performance of ECRO is better than branch and bound (BB) method and beam search (BS) algorithm.