Abstract
Scheduling of automated material handling equipment is a commonly encountered problem in advanced manufacturing environments. It occurs whenever there is a choice as to the order in which robots can be dispatched to deliver jobs to various locations. In this paper, the manufacturing environment of interest is an automated electroplating system where hoists (robots) are used to move printed circuit boards (jobs) between tanks for treatment. Previous studies were restricted to the unidirectional transfer of jobs between tanks. However, when the manufacturing environment is constrained by floor space (a common situation in Hong Kong), hoists must be allowed to transfer jobs bidirectionally to minimize the number of identical tanks in the system. A visual simulation model was developed to assess the performance of three popular dispatching rules for the bidirectional multi-hoist production scheduling system. These three dispatching rules are (1) nearest robot first (NRF), (2) average robot assignment (ARA), and (3) boundary shift by job location (BSJL).
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