Performance improvement for online schedulers for packaging systems

Abstract

The present paper addresses the design of an optimal online scheduler for a robotized packaging system. The task of the plant is to pick incoming products from a conveyor belt and pack them into boxes with multiple capacity. Specifically, the goal of the proposed control technique is to lose as less products as possible. To design a suitable controller for this type of plants, an optimization problem (MILP) is formulated. The designed controller is also able to set the belt velocities to maximize the throughput. The topic of this paper is the evaluation and optimization of the control strategy performance. Specifically, a reduction of the computational effort is obtained with a special cost function definition. Furthermore the robot model has been conceived in order to improve the “mission in progress” constraints. Numerical results confirm the superiority of the proposed approach with respect to the simpler solutions adopted in industrial applications.