Hypergraphical Real-Time Multirobot Task Allocation in a Smart Factory

To facilitate Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing, smart factories shall flexibly achieve mass manufacture of on-demand individualized products. Reconfigurable multirobot system (MRS)-driven smart factories as a representative paradigm fulfill the above requirements through dynamically adjusting production flows while optimizing productivity and energy efficiency. This article innovates real-time multirobot task allocation to coordinate a heterogeneous MRS so that frequent reconfiguration brought by dynamic production demands can be answered. The challenges brought by frequent production flow adjustment are analyzed and addressed by proposing a hypergraph MRS model and a hypergraph search algorithm. The hypergraph MRS model is tailored to characterize temporal–spatial features and heterogeneity of the MRS, task assignments of production robots, and transportation paths of transportation robots. The hypergraph search algorithm fulfills the production demands, dual-objective dual-agent optimization of productivity and energy efficiency, and constant time complexity for real-time coordination. Computational experiments show that the proposed approach delivers effective task assignments of optimized MRS productivity and energy efficiency with robust performance.