A spatio-temporal constrained hierarchical scheduling strategy for multiple warehouse mobile robots under industrial cyber–physical system

Abstract

The industrial cyber–physical system (ICPS) framework can reduce the computational load and improve task efficiency. This paper studies the ICPS-based scheduling strategy for multi-warehouse mobile robots (multi-WMRs). First of all, the possible congestion problem is considered in topological map modeling, which is transformed into a new path time cost index. Second, each robot independently executes the path planning algorithm, which realizes distributed path computation and takes time cost and destination distance into account. The improved task assignment strategy includes task evaluation and decision-making, which are considered part of the planning and help to improve task efficiency. Finally, the complete scheduling process is applied to the novel ICPS architecture, including cost evaluation, path planning, task assignment, and collision avoidance. In numerical experiments, the task efficiency has been increased by 24.8% to recent research and 14.59% to previous work. The average congestion time is reduced by 28.41%, and the planning time is reduced to 10.13% of the traditional method.