Multi-robot task scheduling in micro-manufacturing

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for representing a large and relevant class of industrial multi-robot task scheduling problems. Given a set of tasks and a set of robots and other resources our objective is to schedule the execution of the tasks such that the makespan of the schedule is minimized. Resource availability and a partially constrained sequence ordering is considered during scheduling as well as bounds on the relative execution time of pairs of tasks. Previous research focus mainly on solving specific instances of task scheduling problems, but by introducing the concept of side effects our framework gains a much broader applicability. Experiments verify the applicability of our framework to micro-manufacturing