A number of di€ erent performance measures have been used in the design and analysis of material handling systems. These performance measures have measured either: (1) the entire manufacturing system (e.g. job throughput), or (2) the material handling system independently (e.g. vehicle travel distance). The following is a review of performance, reliability, and performabilitymeasures used in th...

We will present a progress report on our effort to develop a science-based design methodology for warehousing systems. In particular, we will discuss the hierarchical structure of our design procedure. This includes the decisions and parameters used in the master model, the various sub-models, and the decision and data interaction between the various levels in the hierarchy. We will present sev...

In today’s dynamic market, organizations must be adaptive to market fluctuations. In addition, studies show that material-handling cost makes up between 20 and 50 percent of the total operating cost. Therefore, this paper considers the problem of arranging and rearranging, when there are changes in product mix and demand, manufacturing facilities such that the sum of material handling and rearr...

Simulation is used to verify the feasibility of the design of manufacturing cells. The cell design, which combines new and existing machines in a component manufacture, is presented, showing the difficulties that can result with such a system. Simply changing the layout (arranging machines into cells) could provide some benefits, but these benefits were offset by a high level of required invest...

This paper presents the idea of creating cells while reducing part-level sequence-dependent setup time in general cellular manufacturing systems (CMS). Setup time reduction in CMS has gained modest attention in the literature. This could be attributed to the fact that the fundamental problem in cell formation in CMS has been mainly related to material handling and machine utilization while setu...