A Parallel Algorithm for Scheduling a Two-Machine Robotic Cell in Bicycle Frame Welding Process

Featured Application The proposed method can be applied to optimize welding stations with two or more positioners for each welding robot. Such robotic cells ares used, e.g., in welding aluminum bicycle frames. Welding frames with differing geometries is one of the most crucial stages in the production of high-end bicycles. This paper proposes a parallel algorithm and a mixed integer linear programming formulation for scheduling a two-machine robotic welding station. The time complexity of the introduced parallel method is O(log(2)n) on an n(3)-processor Exclusive Read Exclusive Write Parallel Random-Access Machine (EREW PRAM), where n is the problem size. The algorithm is designed to take advantage of modern graphics cards to significantly accelerate the computations. To present the benefits of the parallelization, the algorithm is compared to the state of art sequential method and a solver-based approach. Experimental results show an impressive speedup for larger problem instances-up to 314 on a single Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), compared to a single-threaded CPU execution of the sequential algorithm.