Planning and scheduling biological experiments across multiple liquid handling robots

Abstract

Coordinating multiple liquid handling robots is a complex logistical task when designing biological experiments. Protocol designers must consider the capabilities and constraints of each robot to distribute work optimally across multiple instruments. We developed an optimization framework that finds optimal liquid handling solutions that leverage an arbitrary number of robots. Our algorithm, called Pourfecto, abstracts the capabilities of each robot and their labware, allowing us to plan and schedule a wide range of biological experiments using commercial instruments and custom-built hardware. Pourfecto can optimize multiple objectives (minimum transfers, fewest reagents, fewest labware swaps) and scales to experiments with hundreds of thousands of liquid transfers.