Coordinative scheduling of the mobile robots and machines based on hybrid GA in flexible manufacturing systems

Mobile robots (MRs) constitute a novel manufacturing concept in flexible manufacturing systems and can perform transportation tasks of parts and tools, which significantly contributes to the workshop flexibility and sharing of manufacturing resources. In such a scene, this paper focuses on a complex coordinative scheduling problem of MRs and machines, and a mixed-integer programming model is developed to optimize the makespan. Then, a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) embedded with a rule-based solution construction method is proposed to solve this problem. Finally, the case study is conducted, and the results indicate that the proposed model performs well with our methods.