Human-robot collaborative systems (HRCS) have the potential to dramatically change many aspects of surgery, manufacturing, hazardous-material handling, and other dextrous tasks. We are particularly interested in precise manipulation tasks, which are typically performed under an admittance-control regime, where the controlled velocity is proportional to the user-applied force. During precise fas...

Material handling systems consist of discrete or continuous resources to move entities from one location to another. They are more common in manufacturing systems compared to service systems. Material movement occurs everywhere in a factory or warehouse—before, during, and after processing. Apple (1977) notes that material handling can account for up to 80 percent of production activity. Althou...

Purpose – In spite of having a number of general-purpose algorithms for solving plant layout problems, facility planners may still face a challenging task to adjust these algorithms to handle special, but not uncommon, layout problems. The purpose of this study is to propose a new method for addressing the impact of overhead space utilization on a plant layout solution. Design/methodology/appro...

Material selection is one of the major problems in manufacturing environments since the improper selected material may lead to fail in the production processes and result in customer dissatisfaction and cost inefficiency. Every material has different properties which should be considered as major criteria during the material selection procedure. Selection criteria could be quantitative or quali...

Mangosteen is a major Thai export produce which brings economic benefits to farmers. The objectives of this paper are to study the mangosteen supply chain in eastern Thailand and analyze the logistics cost structure for mangosteen farmers. The results show that the highest logistics cost consists of material handling such as post-harvest, grading, and handling, followed by transportation, procu...

Assigning operations to feasible and suitable machine-tool combination is one of the significant problems in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). This assignment affects on the total production costs and thus selecting the best combination is very significant for the system. This paper considers a multi-objective problem that minimizes the machining cost, setup cost and material handling cost...

background: manual handling, lifting, or carrying of material is responsible for non-fatal injuries among employees in industries. it is the second most prevalent reported risk factor in workplaces that can lead to potential manual handling accidents and longer-term musculoskeletal disorders (msds). the aim of this study was the evaluation of manual material handling using the american national...

The study objectives are to 1) provide information regarding the use and benefits of Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) systems in manufacturing environments, and 2) review the literature related to design, modeling and simulation of AGV systems. We classify the tools utilized in design problems of AGV systems as analytical and simulation-based tools. Then, give examples of both categories from rel...

Traditional productivity analysis has emerged in mass production and cannot be adopted one-to-one on One-of-a-kind production (OKP). Due to the non-repetitive character of the processes in OKP, productivity improvements do not reproduce like in mass production. In addition, preparatory activities such as orientation, material handling and positioning usually consume a lot more time than the act...