An Energy Efficient Assembly Line Balancing Problem with Human-Robot Collaboration

Date

2023-8-10

Author

Erol, Gizem

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Assembly line balancing problems (ALBPs) have been extensively studied in the literature. Due to technological advancements, evolving customers expectations, and increase in energy costs, several new variations of ALBPs are still being introduced. Integrating robots in assembly lines is a promising area of research providing several potential benefits, such as flexibility, productivity, safety, and energy-efficiency. In this study, we focus on an ALBP where robots and human operators are allowed to collaborate in parallel within the same workstations. It is assumed that the speeds of the robots can be adjusted (within allowable limits) with higher speeds resulting in higher energy consumptions. Given a maximum desired cycle time, we aim to decide on the workstations at which a fixed number of robots will work in parallel to human operators, the assignment of tasks to robots and human operators, and the speeds of the robots so as to minimize the resulting energy-consumption of the robots. We provide a Mixed-Integer Second-Order Cone Programming formulation of the problem to be able to solve it optimally. This formulation, however, is only able to solve small size instances within an hour. To overcome this issue, we discretize the speed values and provide a Constraint Programming and a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming formulations for the discretized problem. Moreover, a speed optimization procedure is proposed to further improve the discretized solutions. Furthermore, we present bounds on earliest and latest workstation in which tasks can be performed and ex- amine how incorporating these bounds affects solution quality and time. We perform extensive computational experiments to evaluate the solution quality and execution times of the proposed methods.

Subject Keywords

Montaj hattı dengeleme, Enerji verimli montaj hattı dengeleme, İnsan- robot işbirliği, Karışık tam sayılı doğrusal programlama, İkinci dereceden konik programlama, Kısıt programlama

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/105171

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis