Abstract This paper describes a Grid-like Material Transportation Network (GMTN) in which several heterogeneous means of transportation (Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), hoists, lifts, etc.) interact with each other via common shared workstations to provide a variety of demand-responsive material handling operations. Different material handling transport modes provide movement of workpieces between workstations along their manufacturing routes in the GMTN and they can be seen as processes realized with synergic utilization of various local periodically acting unimodal processes. The main contribution of this research is the solution of a constraint satisfaction problem addressing AGVs fleet match-up scheduling subject to GMTN and fuzzy operation time constraints. In the presented case both production rate (production takt) and operations execution time are described by imprecise (fuzzy) data. In other words, the research’s objective concerns assessing grid-like networks of periodically acting local transportation modes from the perspective of possible mass-customized oriented requirements imposed on scheduling of multimodal flows of jobs assigned to certain technological routes passing through common shared workstations.
open-source software, cutting stock problem, branch-and-price methods, and integer programming
Abstract
The rate at which research ideas can be prototyped is significantly increased when re-useable software components are employed. A mission of the Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR) initiative is to promote the development and use of re-useable open-source tools for operations research professionals. In this paper, we introduce the COIN-OR initiative and survey recent progress in integer programming that utilizes COIN-OR components. In particular, we present an implementation of an algorithm for finding integer-optimal solutions to a cutting-stock problem. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005
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