摘要：More and more robots have been introduced into production systems. Such a system may be called robotic production system. One important feature with such systems is the improved versatility in terms of its capability of fulfilling different tasks. The study presented in this paper developed a general approach for balancing of a production line with consideration of robots along with their functions and locations, and reliability of the line by assuming the unlimited availability of human resources. The approach has two parts: (1) the concept design of the production line and (2) computational line balancing. Specifically, for (2), the line balancing problem is formulated into a multi-objective optimization model with three objectives (i.e., balance rate, smoothness index, and economic cost) and the decision variables including robots and their locations. A specific textile production system was taken as an example to illustrate how this approach works and to show its effectiveness. As a result, a considerable improvement of such a robotic production line has been achieved after optimization in terms of the Takt time and the balance rate, particularly the Takt time being reduced by 18.52% and the balance rate being increased by 51.84%. The proposed approach is general, thus applicable to other robotic production systems, and expandable to inclusion of human factors.
