Bi-objective green in-house transportation scheduling and fleet size determination in mixed-model assembly lines with mobile robots

Abstract

Purpose

Facing the challenge of increasing energy cost and requirement of reducing the emissions, identifying the potential factors of them in the manufacturing factories is an important prerequisite to control energy consumption. This paper aims to present a bi-objective green in-house transportation scheduling and fleet size determination problem (BOGIHTS&FSDP) in automobile assembly line to schedule the material delivery tasks, which jointly take the energy consumption into consideration as well.

Design/methodology/approach

This research proposes an optimal method for material handling in automobile assembly line. To solve the problem, several properties and definitions are proposed to solve the model more efficiently. Because of the non-deterministic polynomial-time-hard nature of the proposed problem, a Multi-objective Discrete Differential Evolution Algorithm with Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS-MDDE) is developed to solve the multi-objective problem.

Findings

The performances of VNS-MDDE are evaluated in simulation and the results indicate that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient in solving BOGIHTS&FSDP problem.

Originality/value

This study is the first to take advantage of the robot's interactive functions for part supply in automobile assembly lines, which is both the challenge and trend of future intelligent logistics under the pressure of energy and resource. To solve the problem, a VNS-MDDE is developed to solve the multi-objective problem.

Citation

Zhou, B., Zhang, J. and Fei, Q. (2022), "Bi-objective green in-house transportation scheduling and fleet size determination in mixed-model assembly lines with mobile robots", Engineering Computations, Vol. 39 No. 7, pp. 2630-2654. https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-08-2021-0483