Abstract
Robotic cellular manufacturing systems are a new type of manufacturing system in which one or more flexible robots carry out a large number of assembly operations that would be performed by people in conventional cellular manufacturing systems. The conceptual design stage, when the assembly system layout details are decided, is especially important during the development of effective robot cellular manufacturing systems, since fundamental performances of the system under consideration are determined at this stage. Since development of a decision-support system for the conceptual design of robot cellular manufacturing systems would streamline decision making, this paper proposes a layout design optimization method for robot cellular manufacturing systems. First, the design criteria for robot cellular manufacturing system layout designs are clarified, and objective functions are formulated. Next, layout design candidates are represented using a sequence-pair scheme to avoid interference between assembly system components, and the use of dummy components is proposed to represent layout areas where components are sparse. A multiobjective genetic algorithm is then used to obtain Pareto optimal solutions for the layout optimization problems. Finally, several numerical examples are shown to illustrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed method.
