In this paper, the authors analyze the efficiency of a given robot movement schedule for the case of a flow shop robotic production cell with m different machines, one input conveyor, and one output conveyor. They begin with the case of one-robot cells and extend the present results to multirobot cells. The paper studies the efficiency of a movement schedule for identical parts by defining a movement network associated with this schedule. This network models any cell layout and applies to multirobot cells. Using the movement network, the authors propose two cycle time evaluation methods, the first using linear progamming and the second based on finding a longest path. The latter method generates a procedure to obtain an analytical formula for the cycle time. The authors extend the proposed methods to study the efficiency of a given input sequence (schedule) for different parts, that is, to determine the sequence processing time. The results obtained here allow them to quickly evaluate the efficiency of any given feasible movement schedule, for identical or different parts.
