Scheduling of human-robot collaboration in assembly of printed circuit boards: a constraint programming approach

Abstract

The advancement of technology and the empowerment of the industry have made humans and robots more closely tied together, known as human-robot collaboration. A sector that specifically utilises this collaboration is the printed circuit boards industry. Therefore in this industry, proper allocation of tasks to humans and robots is crucial. This study investigates this type of allocation to minimise makespan. A Constraint Programming based (CP) approach is developed to solve the problem as the main novelty of this study. A single board problem, as the basic model, is developed by adding more assumptions including different groups of tasks, no-wait scheduling of tasks, multi-agent planning, and multiple boards sequencing. Then, different experimental instances are generated and solved to analyse the performance of CP and the sensitivity of idle time and makespan to key parameters of the problem. The superiority of the computational results of CP over mathematical programming is evident.