Heuristics for the design of part-orienting systems

In many manufacturing systems, parts must be fed to automatic machines in a specific orientation. This is often accomplished by what are known as part-orienting systems (POSs). A POS consists of one or more separate devices that orient parts, usually with multiple orientations. A theoretical analysis along with the development of some heuristic algorithms is carried out in order to treat the problem of efficient selection and ordering of part-orienting devices that make up a POS. It is indicated that the size of such problems can be quite large in the context of flexible manufacturing systems which may require what are known as flexible part-orienting systems for their efficient operation. Computational experiments are performed in order to evaluate the relative performance of the heuristic algorithms.     

A Loop Material Flow System Design for Automated Guided Vehicles

We develop an exact integer programming formulation to design a loop material flow system for unit-load automated guided vehicles. The model simultaneously determines both the design of the unidirectional loop flow pattern and the location of the pickup and delivery stations. The objective is to minimize the total loaded-vehicle trip distances. To solve the problem, we concentrate on developing a better formulation for the LP subproblem, preprocessing the problem, identifying the appropriate set of LP/IP routines, analyzing the mathematical properties of the problem, and developing an intelligent branch and bound solution procedure.