Advanced cascaded scheduling for highly autonomous production cells with material flow and tool lifetime consideration using AGVs

In today’s manufacturing systems, especially in Industry 4.0, highly autonomous production cells play an important role. To reach this goal of autonomy, different technologies like industrial robots, machine tools, and automated guided vehicles (AGV) are deployed simultaneously which creates numerous challenges on various automation levels. One of those challenges regards the scheduling of all applied resources and their corresponding tasks. Combining data from a real production environment and Constraint Programming (CP-SAT), we provide a cascaded scheduling approach that plans production orders for machine tools to minimize makespan and tool changeover time while enabling the corresponding robot for robot-collaborated processes. Simultaneously, AGVs provide all production cells with the necessary material and tools. Hereby, magazine capacity for raw material as well as finished parts and tool service life are taken into account.