The management and control of material flow forms the core of manufacturing execution systems (MES) in the petrochemical industry. The bottleneck in the application of MES is the ability to match the material-flow model with the production processes. A dynamic material-flow model is proposed in this paper after an analysis of the material-flow characteristics of the production process in a petr...

Previous researchers have developed ways of managing forward-oriented supply chains, and gave insight to solve single-stage inventory systems. In this study, we analyze an inventory system with traditional forward-oriented material flow as well as a reverse material flow supply chain. In the reverse material flow, the used products are returned, remanufactured and shipped to the retailer for re...

People often perform poorly on stock-flow reasoning tasks, with many (but not all) participants appearing to erroneously match the accumulation of the stock to the inflow – a response pattern attributed to the use of a “correlation heuristic”. Efforts to improve understanding of stock-flow systems have been limited by the lack of a principled approach to identifying and measuring individual dif...

Financial misrepresentation has serious, detrimental economic and social impacts. We present hypotheses regarding the factors that incline a firm to misrepresent its finances. Using a matched sample design, we find that three factors increase a firm’s probability of misrepresenting its financial position: performance below its industry’s average performance, performance significantly above its ...

Combining modern thermodynamics theory branches, including finite time thermodynamics or entropy generation minimization, constructal theory and entransy theory, with metallurgical process engineering, this paper provides a new exploration on generalized thermodynamic optimization theory for iron and steel production processes. The theoretical core is to thermodynamically optimize performances ...

The bullwhip effect is a well-known phenomenon of demand information distortion in supply chains. To measure the bullwhip effect in a supply chain, researchers often resort to material flow data, i.e., shipments and sales data, as proxies for order and demand information. In this paper, we study the accuracy of such an approximated bullwhip measure and provide remedies for correcting the estima...

This paper describes the application of discrete event simulation to study continuous material flow. Logistics is an integrated part of most manufacturing companies. The purpose of this study is to determine the required logistics operations to allow continuous operations of a chemical manufacturing plant. The application has been used to provide critical decision support.

E-mail: [email protected] ∗2Institute of Machine Tools and Manufacturing, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland ∗3Chair of Enterprise Logistics, Technical University of Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany ∗4Department of Computer Science VII, Technical University of Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany ∗5F/L/S Fuzzy Logik Systeme GmbH, Dortmund, Germany ∗6Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and...

The need to improve the access to safe water is generally recognized for the benefit of public health in developing countries. This study's objective was to identify critical parameters which are essential for improving the performance of ceramic pot filters (CPFs) as a point-of-use water treatment system. Defining critical production parameters was also relevant to confirm that CPFs with high-...