Green Technologies for Production Processes

This book focuses on original research works about Green Technologies for Production Processes, including discrete production processes and process production processes, from various aspects that tackle product, process, and system issues in production. The aim is to report the state-of-the-art on relevant research topics and highlight the barriers, challenges, and opportunities we are facing. This book includes 22 research papers and involves energy-saving and waste reduction in production processes, design and manufacturing of green products, low carbon manufacturing and remanufacturing, management and policy for sustainable production, technologies of mitigating CO2 emissions, and other green technologies

Planning and Scheduling Optimization

Although planning and scheduling optimization have been explored in the literature for many years now, it still remains a hot topic in the current scientific research. The changing market trends, globalization, technical and technological progress, and sustainability considerations make it necessary to deal with new optimization challenges in modern manufacturing, engineering, and healthcare systems. This book provides an overview of the recent advances in different areas connected with operations research models and other applications of intelligent computing techniques used for planning and scheduling optimization. The wide range of theoretical and practical research findings reported in this book confirms that the planning and scheduling problem is a complex issue that is present in different industrial sectors and organizations and opens promising and dynamic perspectives of research and development

Sustainable Freight Village Concepts for Agricultural Products Logistics - A Knowledge Management-oriented Study

Freight villages (FVs) are logistics phenomenon with broad economic, environmental, and social consequences. This research extends sustainability in the context of FVs to twofold meanings. This includes the sustainable development of FVs, and the sustainability contributions they created. China has showed a more recent but quicker story in developing FVs. Nevertheless, a number of problems and limits exist. Taking China as research background, this research consists of theoretical explorations, status quo analysis, and practical applications in agricultural products logistics (APL). This research proposes that knowledge management (KM) is the most desirable option to reach sustainable values of FVs. The status quo analysis examines the adaption of FVs to China s current logistics situation. It identifies several orientations for the next development step of FVs. To cope with the pervasive problems during FV planning stage, this research adopts sense-making KM approach to guide a systematic planning process including sense making, knowledge creation, and decision making. In order to achieve a high sustainability rating, this research uses KM cycle model to generate synergies among major stakeholders of FVs. Moreover, it proposes a roadmap for organizing KM process so as to build sustainability capability. Three key elements for the roadmap are identified: human ability, stakeholder engagement, and information system. This research focuses on the application of sustainable FV concepts for agricultural products logistics (APL). It deals with issues affecting city logistics and agricultural products (agri-products) supply in China. This can make best use of FV functions from a sustainability perspective. Agri-FV is proposed to bring professional logistics facilities and services, efficient distribution of agri-products, and information-based operations. An integrated APL system is structured consisting of farmers cooperatives, chain stores, and agri-FVs. In this system, agri-FV plays an important role in levering sustainability outcomes. Furthermore, KM approaches are applied to agri-FV project planning and operations, meanwhile considering the characteristics of agri-products and APL

How autonomous control can improve the performance of logistics networks - a simulation experiment

In this thesis the application of autonomous control concepts to logistics networks is studied by means of a simulation model. This simulation model is based on an actual outbound bulk product supply network of a commodity company. Logistics planning and operation is facing growing challenges, such as increasing complexity and distribution, driven by Megatrends such as globalisation and integration. Decentralisation through autonomous control seems to offer to a promising approach to address these challenges.The idea for the supply network at hand is therefore, to enable individual transportation units to autonomously take operational decisions, thus shifting control of the supply network from a central to a local perspective.In surveying the literature and the academic discussion on autonomous control in logistics, software agents are identified as a suitable and well-studied approach to implement such a concept. Therefore, a multi-agent-based simulation model of the supply network is constructed to execute and test the solution. The model is built using data based on empirical observations and offers a full-scale simulation of the actual supply network.In the model, software agents represent the individual transportation units, allowing them to communicate and interact autonomously, effectively decentralising operational control.A comparative simulation experiment is designed and carried out, contrasting several different control scenarios.The simulation results obtained show, that autonomous control can positively impact the performance of this supply network. Autonomous control scenarios require a lower number of trucks to achieve full order delivery and help to increase robustness of the supply network regarding the impact of environmental factors. Additionally, the more efficient use of transportation capacity may lead to a reduction in cost for transportation. The findings are verified with an industry subject matter expert and potential barriers onthe path towards implementation are described