Optimal Robot Fleet Selection and Resilient Management of Intra-Factory Logistics

Mithun Goutham's Ph.D. Defense https://www.proquest.com/openview/6e7... Short Abstract: Compared to conventional production systems, autonomous manufacturing facilities use robot fleets for material handling, offering greater flexibility and faster recovery from disruptions. Purchasing this fleet, however, is a capital-intensive decision that poses a challenging optimization problem. To address this, a novel framework is developed that decomposes the problem and simultaneously executes exact and approximate algorithms on a high-performance computing environment to identify the optimal fleet composition. A second contribution enhances the facility’s ability to withstand disruptions through a transfer learning approach that coordinates the robot fleet, leveraging similarities between nominal and disrupted scenarios. Finally, to support proactive decision making, a novel algorithm is introduced that identifies the facility’s operational limits, with guaranteed localization accuracy of the resulting operational envelope.