Evaluation of dispatching rules in a robot handling system

A system is described in which a conveyor delivers the workpieces to an island consisting of five machines and a robot which moves the workpieces among the machines. The robot is the shared resource of this island: its control is a major factor in the performance of the system and should prevent machines from blocking/starving by full output/no input. The authors develop a model of the system based on stochastic Petri nets. The presented model captures, in a natural way, the main features of the system and allows one to formulate and evaluate different robot control policies. The computational results from a numerical steady-state analysis are also presented.<>