Velocity balancing in flexible manufacturing systems

Practical incentives motivate the development of optimal working schedules in manufacturing environments. Most often, such development is focused on time optimality issues, without concern for how the resulting schedules are executed. In practice, this often leads to an unnecessarily high amount of acceleration during a production cycle, which affects negatively the productive life of the manufacturing equipment. In this paper, we present and compare several methods to reduce the acceleration load in a production cell by processing a given working schedule, without compromising such features of the schedule as cycle time optimality, collision- and deadlock avoidance.