A production line in a factory can be made up of multiple production stations or work cells. Each station/work cell includes one or multiple machines or equipment performing a specific function, such as pretreatment, multilevel processing, testing and assembly. In each work cell, robots or humans move between machines/process steps to load and unload parts. In this project, we focus on the analysis of this kind of work cell, referred to as a gantry work cell.
In manufacturing systems research, tremendous works focus on the analysis of production lines from the high system level point of view, where the stations are abstracted and treated as one entity without considering inner interactions within each station. On the other hand, manufacturing process researches mainly focus on the physical parameters and their impacts of a specific operation/process while ignoring the interrelationships between operations. To fill the gap between a high level production system analysis and a specific process analysis, we are working on:
- Establish a mathematical model for real-time performance analysis of a gantry work cell
- For fixed sequence gantry moving policies, find system properties and performance evaluation explicitly
- Developing reconfiguration strategies for the gantry work cell in face of market demand fluctuation
- Apply machine learning methods or other control methods to optimize the gantry moving policies