Operations management issues in design and control of hybrid human-robot collaborative manufacturing systems: a survey

A manufacturing system able to perform a high variety of tasks requires different types of resources. Fully automated systems using robots possess high speed, accuracy, tirelessness, and force, but they are expensive. On the other hand, human workers are intelligent, creative, flexible, and able to work with different tools in different situations. A combination of these resources forms a human-machine/robot (hybrid) system, where humans and robots perform a variety of tasks (manual, automated, and hybrid tasks) in a shared workspace. Contrarily to the existing surveys, this study is dedicated to operations management problems (focusing on the applications and features) for human and machine/robot collaborative systems in manufacturing. This research is divided into two types of interactions between human and automated components in manufacturing and assembly systems: dual resource constrained (DRC) and human-robot collaboration (HRC) optimization problems. Moreover, different characteristics of the workforce and machines/robots such as heterogeneity, homogeneity, ergonomics, and flexibility are introduced. Finally, this paper identifies the optimization challenges and problems for hybrid systems. The existing literature on HRC focuses mainly on the robotic point of view and not on the operations management and optimization aspects. Therefore, the future research directions include the design of models and methods to optimize HRC systems in terms of ergonomics, safety, and throughput. In addition, studying flexibility and reconfigurability in hybrid systems is one of the main research avenues for future research.