Abstract
Necessary and sufficient conditions for material handling scheduling are clarified in order to construct a flexible and agile transportation system composed of multiple conveyor belts. In addition to a conventional straight forward belt, a special type of belt is adopted to change the material flow direction when transporting a product between two manufacturing resources. In the present paper, three essential motions of the belts are identified, which are translation on the belt, transition between two belts and rotation of the belt. The time conditions of each motion are formulated strictly for the synchronization of two belts. Furthermore, a representative scheduling problem is introduced according to the derived conditions for multiple conveying paths in a production shop. The scheduling problem is formulated in a mixed integer programming manner and solved numerically to accomplish the production without any conflicts during the transportation.
