HEURISTIC METHOD FOR THE TWIN-ROBOTS SCHEDULING PROBLEM IN PICKUP AND DELIVERY SYSTEMS

This research considers the Twin-Robot Pallet Assignment and Scheduling Problem - TRPASP, in which two robots are positioned on opposite sides of a rail to perform pickup/delivery operations. The problem consists of defining which products should be assigned to each robot, indicating the pickup point and the delivery point, as well as the sequence in which each robot will perform the operations, aiming to minimize the total time to perform the tasks, and addressing the safety constraints to avoid collisions between the robots. A PLIM model that determines the global optimal solution for small instances is presented, considering that the problem is np-hard. For larger instances, a heuristic approach capable of determining feasible solutions in very satisfactory computational time is presented. The heuristic is validated for instances where the optimal solution is known. For larger instances the results analyzed have been satisfactory.