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International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming

CP 2019: Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming pp 456–471Cite as

Scheduling of Mobile Robots Using Constraint Programming

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNPSE,volume 11802)

Abstract

Mobile robots in flexible manufacturing systems can transport components for jobs between machines as well as process jobs on selected machines. While the job shop problem with transportation resources allows encapsulating of transportation, this work concentrates on the extended version of the problem, including the processing by mobile robots. We propose a novel constraint programming model for this problem where the crucial part of the model lies in a proper inclusion of the transportation. We have implemented it in the Optimization Programming Language using the CP Optimizer, and compare it with the existing mixed integer programming solver. While both approaches are capable of solving the problem optimally, a new constraint programming approach works more efficiently, and it can compute solutions in more than an order of magnitude faster. Given that, the results of more realistic data instances are delivered in real-time, which is very important in a smart factory.

Keywords

  • Scheduling
  • Constraint programming
  • Mobile robot
  • Flexible manufacturing system
  • Transportation
  • IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio

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Fig. 1.

(based on [11]).

Notes

  1. 1.

    The source code, including data instances, is available from https://github.com/StanislavMurin/Scheduling-of-Mobile-Robots-using-Constraint-Programming.

  2. 2.

    https://sites.google.com/site/schedulingmobilerobots/.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our paper and their insightful comments and suggestions.

Access to computing and storage facilities owned by parties and projects contributing to the National Grid Infrastructure MetaCentrum provided under the program “Projects of Large Research, Development, and Innovations Infrastructures” (CESNET LM2015042), is greatly appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Stanislav Murín & Hana Rudová

Authors
  1. Stanislav Murín
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  2. Hana Rudová
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stanislav Murín .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. INRA, Castanet Tolosan, France

    Thomas Schiex

  2. INRA, Castanet Tolosan, France

    Simon de Givry

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Murín, S., Rudová, H. (2019). Scheduling of Mobile Robots Using Constraint Programming. In: Schiex, T., de Givry, S. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11802. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30048-7_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30048-7_27

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