Institute for Systems Research Technical Reports

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/4376

This archive contains a collection of reports generated by the faculty and students of the Institute for Systems Research (ISR), a permanent, interdisciplinary research unit in the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. ISR-based projects are conducted through partnerships with industry and government, bringing together faculty and students from multiple academic departments and colleges across the university.

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Author: search.filters.author.Minis, IoannisSubject: search.filters.subject.plant layout

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    An Integrated Model for Manufacturing Shop Design
    (1995) Ioannou, George; Minis, Ioannis; ISR
    This paper presents an integer programming formulation for the manufacturing shop design problem, which integrates decisions concerning the layout of the resource groups on the shop floor with the design of the material handling system. The model reflects critical practical design concerns including the capacity of the flow network and of the transporters, and the tradeoff between fixed (construction and acquisition) and variable (operational) costs. For realistic industrial cases, the size of the problem prevents the solution through explicit or implicit enumeration schemes. The paper addresses this limitation by decomposing the global model into its natural components. The resulting submodels are shown to be standard problems of operations research. The decomposition approach provides ways to solve the integrated shop design problem in an effective manner.
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    Current Research on Manufacturing Shop and Material Handling System Design
    (1995) Ioannou, George; Minis, Ioannis; ISR
    The importance of the manufacturing shop design in the successful operation of a production system is well known and as a result, significant research has been devoted to this area. This paper reviews important literature in various aspects of manufacturing shop design including layout, material flow path design, and transporter fleet sizing and routing. In addition, the paper focuses on contributions to integration issues such as the design for operation of material handling systems, and the concurrent design of the shop layout and the transportation system. Research studies in these areas are critically examined, and emerging opportunities for research are identified.
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    Minimization of Acquisition and Operational Costs in Horizontal Material Handling System Design
    (1995) Herrmann, Jeffrey W.; Ioannou, George; Minis, Ioannis; Proth, J.M.; ISR
    This paper considers the problem of minimizing the fixed cost of acquiring material handling transporters and the operational cost of material transfer in a manufacturing system. This decision problem arises during manufacturing facility design, and is modeled using an integer programming formulation. Two efficient heuristics are developed to solve it. Computational complexity, worst-case performance analysis, and extensive computational tests are provided for both heuristics. The results indicate that the proposed methods are well suited for large-scale manufacturing applications.
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    Design of Material Flow Networks in Manufacturing Facilities
    (1994) Herrmann, Jeffrey W.; Ioannou, George; Minis, Ioannis; Nagi, R.; Proth, J.M.; ISR
    In this paper we consider the design of material handling flow paths in a discrete parts manufacturing facility. A fixed-charge capacitated network design model is presented and two efficient heuristics are proposed to determine near-optimal solutions to the resulting NP- hard problem. The heuristics are tested against an implicit enumeration scheme used to obtain optimal solutions for small examples. For more realistic cases, the solutions of the heuristics are compared to lower bounds obtained by either the linear programming relaxation of the mixed integer program, or an iterative dual ascent algorithm. The results obtained indicate that the heuristics provide good solutions in reasonable time on the average. The proposed methodology is applied to design the flow paths of an existing manufacturing facility. The role of the flow path network problem in the integrated shop design is also discussed.
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    A Practical Method for Design of Hybrid-Type Production Facilities
    (1994) Harhalakis, George; Lu, Thomas C.; Minis, Ioannis; Nagi, R.; ISR
    A comprehensive methodology for the design of hybrid-type production shops that comprise both manufacturing cells and individual workcenters is presented. It targets the minimization of the material handling effort within the shop and comprises four basic steps: (1) identification of candidate manufacturing cells, (2) evaluation and selection of the cells to be implemented, (3) determination of the intra-cell layout, and (4) determination of the shop layout. For the cell formation step the ICTMM technique has been enhanced to cater for important practical issues. The layout of each significant cell is determined by a simulated annealing (SA)-based algorithm. Once the sizes and shapes of the selected cells are known, the shop layout is determined by a similar algorithm. The resulting hybrid shop consists of the selected cells and the remaining machines. The methodology has been implemented in an integrated software system and has been applied to redesign the shop of a large manufacturer of radar antennas.
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    Manufacturing Cell Formation Under Random Product Demand
    (1993) Harhalakis, George; Minis, Ioannis; Nagi, R.; ISR
    The performance of cellular manufacturing systems is intrinsically sensitive to demand variations and machine breakdowns. A cell formation methodology that addresses, during the shop design stage, system robustness with respect to product demand variation is proposed. The system resources are aggregated into cells in a manner that minimizes the expected inter-cell material handling cost. The statistical characteristics of the independent demand and the capacity of the system resources are explicitly considered. In the first step of the proposed approach the expected value of the feasible production volumes, which respect resource capacities, are determined. Subsequently, the shop partition that results in near optimal inter cell part traffic is found. The applicability of the proposed approach is illustrated through a comprehensive examples.
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    Class: Computerized LAyout Solutions Using Simulated Annealing
    (1990) Minis, Ioannis; Harhalakis, George; Jajodia, Satish K.; Proth, J.M.; ISR
    A new method (Computerized LAyout Solutions using Simulated annealing - CLASS) that considers the inter-cell and intra-cell layout problems in a cellular manufacturing environment is presented. It addresses the relative placement of equidimensional manufacturing entities within a discrete solution space in an attempt to minimize the total material flow (cost) between these entities. An approach to accommodate the relative sizes of the entities is also presented. The method is based on Simulated Annealing, which has been successfully applied for the solution of combinatorial problems. A major advantage of this technique is the insensitivity of the final solution to the initial conditions. In addition, some important practical issues such as intra-cell layout of machines in pre-determined configurations (e.g. row-wise or circular arrangements), have been addressed. Several comparisons were made with some of the existing approaches for facility layout, such as CRAFT, HC63-66, etc. that yielded results of equal or better quality for each of eight classical test problems.
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    Manufacturing Cell Formation with Multiple, Functionally Identical Machines
    (1990) Minis, Ioannis; Harhalakis, George; Jajodia, Satish K.; ISR
    A comprehensive methodology for the formation of manufacturing cells in an environment consisting of unique as well as multiple, functionally identical machines is presented in this paper. The proposed method presupposes the existence of generic process plans that specify the types of machines required for the manufacture of each part, although more than one machine of the same type may be available in the shop. The production equipment is grouped into manufacturing cells and the manufactured parts are assigned to part families, based on an inter-cell traffic minimization criterion and subject to capacity constraints. Two or more functionally identical machines are included in a cell, only if necessitated by capacity considerations, or traffic minimization arguments. The method also considers both part set- up and run times for the evaluation of the capacity requirements, and uses pallet traffic as opposed to individual part traffic in the minimization criterion.