Vehicle positioning in cell manufacturing systems via robust optimization

Abstract

Numerous manufacturing companies are taking advantage of material handling systems due to their flexibility, reliability, safety and contribution to the increase of productivity. However, several uncertain parameters such as types of cost, availability of vehicle etc., influence the performance of the material handling system greatly. In recent years, robust optimization has proven to be an effective methodology permitting overcoming uncertainty in optimization models. Robust optimization models work well even when probabilistic knowledge of the phenomenon is incomplete. This paper thus proposes two new zero-one programming (ZOP) models for vehicle positioning in multi-cell automated manufacturing system. Uncertain parameters in these models include cost parameters, travel time between each pair of centers of cells and location of machines, average time required for performing all transports from location of machines and availability of the vehicle. Then, the robust counterpart of the proposed ZOP models is presented by using the recent extensions in robust optimization theory. Eventually, to verify the robustness of the solutions obtained by the novel robust optimization model, they are compared to those generated by the deterministic ZOP model for different test problems.