This paper addresses the problem of the joint location and configuration of mobile service robots in hospitals. The robotic system consists of a set of identical base robots that can be configured with different functional modules. The robotic system is designed to perform a set of nursing and logistic activities, each requiring a robot with specific modules. The problem consists of determining the configuration of each base robot and assigning each robot to some given home stations. In this paper, we propose a linear programming model for the joint location and configuration problem. A column generation approach is proposed to provide a tight lower bound and a good feasible solution. The preliminary experiment results are encouraging.
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Baalbaki et al. (2008) studied this question.
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