Home > Papers

 
 
Modelling and optimal control of a conveyor-serviced production station with dynamic pickup point
Hao Tang 1 *, Panfei Wu 1, Li Quan 1, Qi Tan 1, Jing Sun 2
1. School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009
2. Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya 23100-2
*Correspondence author
#Submitted by
Subject:
Funding: The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China （No.JZ2016YYPY0052）, Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China （No.20130111110007）, National Natural Science Foundation of China（No.61573126, 61374158, 71231004）
Opened online: 2 January 2018
Accepted by: none
Citation: Hao Tang, Panfei Wu, Li Quan.Modelling and optimal control of a conveyor-serviced production station with dynamic pickup point[OL]. [ 2 January 2018] http://en.paper.edu.cn/en_releasepaper/content/4742948
 
 
In this paper, we propose an optimal control strategy for a production line composed of a conveyor-serviced production station. The station is equipped with an industrial robot used to unload parts from the conveyor belt considering dynamic pickup points. Compared to traditional stations with fixed pickup points, both the mathematical model and optimal control of the lookahead ranges are more complicated when considering dynamic pickup points. In fact, the randomness of part arrival and processing implies that the unloading and service operations are stochastic. Therefore, we established a semi-Markov decision process model for optimisation problem by defining the buffer vacancy and position of the robot gripper as the system states, and the lookahead range as the control variable. From this process, both numerical and learning-based optimisation methods can be applied to determine optimal or suboptimal lookahead policies depending on the availability of system parameters. We validated the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy from simulations. The results suggest that production considering a dynamic pickup point outperforms that considering a fixed pickup point in various aspects, including the expected long-run average cost, production rate, and cycle time.
Keywords:Flexible manufacturing systems; Conveyor-serviced production station; Semi-Markov decision process; Pickup point
 
 
 

For this paper
  • ● PDF (0B)
  • ● Revision 0 　　
  • ● Print this paper
  • ● Recommend this paper to a friend
  • ● Add to my favorite list

    Saved Papers

    Please enter a name for this paper to be shown in your personalized Saved Papers list

Tags
Add yours

Related Papers

Statistics
PDF Downloaded 139
Bookmarked 0
Recommend 0
Comments Array
Submit your papers