Cycle time for an assembly line in the automotive industry is a crucial requirement for the overall production rate and business achievements. In a multi-robot station, besides workload distribution, operations sequencing, and robot motions, an important issue is robot coordination. A key aspect, so far neglected, is the robot motion delay due to the implementation of robot coordination scheduling: our first contribution is to model these delays into a mathematical formulation in order to minimize their contribution to the overall cycle time. Two different setup scenarios, based on typical hardware setups, are modeled and optimized. The major contribution is an efficient heuristic algorithm to optimize our suggested model, which provides near optimal solutions in fraction of the time required by a general optimization package. We have also integrated such algorithm in a CAM software for robot offline simulation to be able to run industrial scenarios with real CAD models from the automotive industry. The results show that it is possible to reduce the delays due to the synchronization points and consequently cycle time, while still maintaining the pre-computed nominal time scheduling for robot coordination.

汽车行业装配线的周期时间对于整体生产率和业务成就至关重要。在多机器人站中，除了工作量分配，操作排序和机器人动作外，重要的问题是机器人的协调性。迄今为止被忽略的一个关键方面是由于执行机器人协调调度而导致的机器人运动延迟：我们的第一贡献是将这些延迟建模为数学公式，以最大程度地减少其对整个循环时间的影响。基于典型的硬件设置，对两种不同的设置方案进行了建模和优化。主要的贡献是一种有效的启发式算法，可优化我们建议的模型，该算法可在一般优化软件包所需时间的一小部分内提供接近最优的解决方案。我们还将此类算法集成在CAM软件中，用于机器人离线仿真，从而能够使用来自汽车行业的真实CAD模型运行工业场景。结果表明，可以减少由于同步点而导致的延迟，从而减少循环时间，同时仍保持用于机器人协调的预先计算的标称时间调度。