Balancing of assembly lines with collaborative robots

Christian Weckenborg (), Karsten Kieckhäfer, Christoph Müller, Martin Grunewald and Thomas S. Spengler
Additional contact information
Christian Weckenborg: Technische Universität Braunschweig, Institute of Automotive Management and Industrial Production
Karsten Kieckhäfer: Technische Universität Braunschweig, Institute of Automotive Management and Industrial Production
Christoph Müller: Technische Universität Braunschweig, Institute of Automotive Management and Industrial Production
Martin Grunewald: Technische Universität Braunschweig, Institute of Automotive Management and Industrial Production
Thomas S. Spengler: Technische Universität Braunschweig, Institute of Automotive Management and Industrial Production

Business Research, 2020, vol. 13, issue 1, No 5, 93-132

Abstract: Abstract Motivated by recent developments to deploy collaborative robots in industrial production systems, we investigate the assembly line balancing problem with collaborative robots. The problem is characterized by the possibility that human and robots can simultaneously execute tasks at the same workpiece either in parallel or in collaboration. For this novel problem type, we present a mixed-integer programming formulation for balancing and scheduling of assembly lines with collaborative robots. The model decides on both the assignment of collaborative robots to stations and the distribution of workload to workers and robotic partners, aiming to minimize the cycle time. Given the high problem complexity, a hybrid genetic algorithm is presented as a solution procedure. Based on extensive computational experiments, the algorithm reveals promising results in both computational time and solution quality. Moreover, the results indicate that substantial productivity gains can be utilized by deploying collaborative robots in manual assembly lines. This holds especially true for a high average number of robots and tasks to be assigned to every station as well as a high portion of tasks that can be executed by the robot and in collaboration.

Keywords: Industry 4.0; Assembly line balancing; Assembly line configuration; Human–robot collaboration; Cobots (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40685-019-0101-y Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:busres:v:13:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s40685-019-0101-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/40685

DOI: 10.1007/s40685-019-0101-y

Access Statistics for this article

Business Research is currently edited by Thomas Gehrig

More articles in Business Research from Springer, German Academic Association for Business Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().