Do robots raise or lower economic well-being? On the one hand, they raise output and bring more goods and services into reach. On the other hand, they eliminate jobs, shift investments away from machines that complement labor, lower wages, and immiserize workers who cannot compete. The net...

Flexible robotic cells combine the capabilities of robotic flow shops with those of flexible manufacturing systems. In an m-machine flexible cell, each part visits each machine in the same order. However, the m operations can be performed in any order, and each machine can be configured to...

Do robots raise or lower economic well-being? On the one hand, they raise output and bring more goods and services into reach. On the other hand, they eliminate jobs, shift investments away from machines that complement labor, lower wages, and immiserize workers who cannot compete. The net...

Will smart machines replace humans like the internal combustion engine replaced horses? If so, can putting people out of work, or at least out of good work, also put the economy out of business? Our model says yes. Under the right conditions, more supply produces, over time, less demand as the...

This paper considers the problem of scheduling operations in bufferless robotic cells that produce identical parts. Finding a cyclic solution that minimizes the long-run average time to produce a part has long been a fundamental open problem. Most research has been focused on finding an optimal...

We consider the problem of scheduling operations in bufferless robotic cells that produce identical parts using either single-gripper or dual-gripper robots. The objective is to find a cyclic sequence of robot moves that minimizes the long-run average time to produce a part or, equivalently,...

Constant travel-time robotic cells with a single gripper robot and with one or more machines at each processing stage have been studied in the literature. By contrast, cells with a dual gripper robot, although more productive, have so far received scant attention, perhaps due to their inherent...

Interval robotic cells with several processing stages (chambers) have been increasingly used for diverse wafer fabrication processes in semi-conductor manufacturing. Processes such as low-pressure chemical vapor deposition, etching, cleaning and chemical-mechanical planarization, require strict...

This article considers the problems of scheduling operations in single-gripper and dual-gripper bufferless robotic cells in which the arrangement of machines is circular. The cells are designed to produce identical parts under the free-pickup criterion with additive intermachine travel time. The...

This article considers the scheduling of flow shops with a common server that performs all material handling, including the transfer of parts between machines, in the context of robotic cell flow shops. Specifically, the first analytic study of the operations of a robotic cell in which one...