Identical part production in cyclic robotic cells: Concepts, overview and open questions

Robotic cells consist of a flow-shop with a robot for material handling. A single part is to be produced cyclically and the objective is to minimize production rate. This document introduces basic concepts and tools for dealing with cyclic production. In particular, it concentrates on kk-cycles which are production cycles where exactly kk parts enter and leave the cell. One defines the cycle function KK which is the smallest value of kk so that the set of all kk-cycles up to size KK contains an optimal cycle for all instances. Known results and conjectures on these functions are given for the classical case where parts can remain on the machine waiting for the robot and for the no-wait case where parts have to be removed from the machine as soon as their processing is finished.