The use of mobile manipulators for transportation tasks has provided solutions to several flexibility problems in manufacturing systems. Mobile manipulators are mobile entities equipped with robotic arm for loading and unloading of parts and an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) for their transport. In order to increase further the flexibility of these systems, the mobile manipulators could be modular, where their two entities are able to work together or separately. The assignment of transportation operations to different smart entities working together is a complex problem, which has not been addressed sufficiently in the literature. This paper proposes a two-stage decision approach for transportation task assignment, which is based on auction mechanism and a coalition formation process modeled with integer linear programming. A real use case has been implemented to test the efficiency of the proposed method. The proposed approach gives promising results that are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.