Cyclic production for robotic cells served by multi-function robots with resumable processing regime

This paper addresses the problem of finding the optimal robot move cycle to minimise the cycle time of two-machine cells. The earlier robot´s function was mainly moving parts between machines in a manufacturing process. We lift this assumption on robot tasks and assumed a special robot, namely multi-function, which performs a unique operation in transit. This robot starts performing this operation after unloading a part from input buffer and finishes it before loading the part to the output buffer. The processing mode on robot is “stop resume”. Thus, regardless of the gap interrupts during the operation, the robot continues processing on part when it is reloaded to the robot without any loss in time. The focus of this study is on one-unit cycles since they are very popular in industry. The cycle time of two possible one-unit cycles is obtained, and the optimality condition of them is determined.