Automobile sector forms the backbone of manufacturing sector. Vehicle assembly line is important section in automobile plant where repetitive tasks are performed one after another at different workstations. In this thesis, a methodology is proposed to reduce cycle time and time loss due to important factors like equipment failure, shortage of inventory, absenteeism, set-up, material handling, r...

The study of downtime and subsequently machine utilization in a given project is one of the major requirements of an accurate estimation of TBM performance and daily advance rate. Interestingly, while it is very common to report the components of downtime when discussing a tunneling project in the literature; there has not been a great amount of in-depth studies on this topic in the recent year...

We present a constraint-based model and planning engine for manufacturing process planning. By exploiting the expressive power of constraint programming (CP), all relevant, sometimes conflicting pieces of domain knowledge are represented. The planner applies standard propagation techniques and customized search to find cost-optimal solutions in presence of hard, soft and conditional constraints...

Network location models comprise one of the main categories of location models. These models have various applications in regional and urban planning as well as in transportation, distribution, and energy management. In a network location problem, nodes represent demand points and candidate locations to locate the facilities. If the links network is unchangeably determined, the problem will be ...

A spreadsheet-based model for economically characterizing the operation of a radiation treatment program has been used to perform a quantitative financial analysis of scheduled and unscheduled downtime. The incremental cost of downtime is broken down into three categories: remuneration of in-house or third party service technologists, decreased patient capacity, and local operating procedures f...

network location models comprise one of the main categories of location models. these models have various applications in regional and urban planning as well as in transportation, distribution, and energy management. in a network location problem, nodes represent demand points and candidate locations to locate the facilities. if the links network is unchangeably determined, the problem will be ...

Constraint satisfaction techniques provide powerful inference algorithms that can prune choices during search. Constraint-based approaches provide a useful complement to heuristic search optimal planners. We develop a constraint-based model for cost-optimal planning that uses global constraints to improve the inference in planning. The key novelty in our approach is in a transformation of the S...

The energy flow characteristics of Combined Cooling, Heating and Power (CCHP) system are analyzed in detail and the energy flow function is proposed for its two operational strategies: thermal load dominant mode and electrical load dominant mode. In order to improve its economic and environmental efficiency, an optimal economic and environmental dispatch model is built, which includes the fuel ...

For planning to come of age, plans must be judged by a measure of quality, such as the total cost of actions. This report describes an optimal-cost planner which guarantees global optimality whenever the planning problem has a solution. We code the extraction of an optimal plan, from a planning graph with a fixed number k of levels, as a weighted constraint satisfaction problem (WCSP). The spec...