Optimization of Transportation Collaborative Robots Fleet Size in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

The current economic context is uncertain and highly competitive, where companies seek to reduce their production cost and adapt production systems to market needs. Since consumer behaviour becomes more and more unpredictable within shorter and shorter product lifetime, flexible manufacturing systems are introduced to allow company to adapt their production to the market without changing systems. The inherent painful and repetitive transportation activities are central in such workshop, where all other activities, like production and maintenance, are impacted by the transportation task. Recently, more and more collaborative mobile robots fleet are used to ensure this activity. Therefore, the fleet size is necessary to be optimized to reduce costs while avoiding delays. In this paper, we propose a decision making tool based on a multi-agent simulation to help decision makers to find the optimal robot fleet size of transportation robots.