IIE Transactions articles from February 2004

IIE Transactions archives from February 2004

Minimization of tool switches for a flexible manufacturing machine with slot assignment of different tool sizes.
February 1, 2004... 1. Introduction and literature review The concept of flexibility has become a key consideration in the design, operation and management of manufacturing systems. In a survey by Sethi and Sethi (1990) they define flexibility in manufacturing...

Real-time disruption management in a two-stage production and inventory system.
February 1, 2004... 1. Introduction In a typical supply chain environment, material flows through the system and changes form as it goes through various stages. These stages typically include the raw material supplier, the manufacturer, the distributor, the...

A mathematical programming model for global plant location problems: analysis and insights.
February 1, 2004... 1. Introduction Structuring global manufacturing and distribution networks is a complicated decision-making process. The typical input to such a process is a set of markets to serve, a set of products that the company will produce and...

Reducing cycle times in manufacturing and supply chains by input and service rate smoothing.
February 1, 2004... 1. Introduction Many companies facing stiff global competition are seeking ways to improve the market responsiveness of their manufacturing facilities and supply chains. One of their major aims is to reduce the cycle time of products (the...

A Bayesian stochastic programming approach to an employee scheduling problem.
February 1, 2004... 1. Introduction We consider a production planning problem in which a nominal weekday employee schedule is published at the beginning of each month in the face of uncertain production rates and uncertain production equipment availability....

Algorithms for the model configuration problem.
February 1, 2004... The model configuration problem is a combinatorial optimization problem that arises in the context of switching cabinet manufacturing in the telecommunication industry. We discuss the manufacturing environment and define the q-model problem in...

Optimal solution methods for the minimum-backtracking row layout problem.
February 1, 2004... 1. Introduction The problem of identifying a reordering of the rows (and, simultaneously, the columns) of a square matrix has a number of substantive applications, including paired comparison ranking (Flueck and Korsh, 1974), least-squares...

Multi-objective lot splitting for a single product m-machine flowshop line.
February 1, 2004... 1. Introduction Lot splitting is a technique for accelerating the flow of work by splitting job lots into sublots. This way, sublots can be released from upstream machines and reach downstream machines much faster. Consequently, some...