Article ID: | iaor201110582 |
Volume: | 135 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 199 |
End Page Number: | 208 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2012 |
Journal: | International Journal of Production Economics |
Authors: | Gourgand Michel, Che Ada, Wang Yuan, Chabrol Michelle |
Keywords: | manufacturing industries, combinatorial optimization |
No‐wait re‐entrant robotic flowshops are widely used in the electronic industry, such as PCB and semiconductor manufacturing. In such an industry, cyclic production policy is often used due to large lot size and simplicity of implementation. This paper addresses cyclic scheduling of a no‐wait re‐entrant robotic flowshop with multiple robots for material handling. We formulate the problem and propose a polynomial algorithm to find the minimum number of robots for all feasible cycle times. Consequently, the minimum cycle time for any given number of robots can be obtained with the proposed algorithm. The algorithm runs in