System Dynamics Modeling of Multi-Channel Supply Chain System: A Hypothetical LPG Distribution with Disloyal Household Customers

The availability of LPG in the community is a sensitive issue. If there is a shortage, it has the potential to cause chaos and inflation. The final consumers, namely households and micro business stalls, will generally be disloyal. They are not tied to one particular store to get the LPG they need. Since the number of tanks in circulation will remain constant, the analysis of LPG availability can be focused on the number of tanks. Continuous simulation method with system dynamics is generally used in system growth analysis. In this paper the method is utilized to model the discrete movement of tanks circulating in the community which in this case is represented in a much smaller system, consisting of filling stations, agents, and stores. The modeling results provide a sufficient picture of how the availability of the tank can be optimized appropriately

Optimal number of pallets for reconfigurable cyclic manufacturing plants

In a cyclic manufacturing system, the number of pallets in a handling and locating pallet system (HLPS) can have a huge effect on the production cycle time. The complexity of calculating the optimal number of pallets that satisfies the minimal cycle time poses a challenging design problem. In this paper the optimal solution is presented for deterministic cyclic manufacturing systems having determined schedule of tasks for multi-product applications. Furthermore, a specific domain which includes the optimal number of pallets is obtained for any arbitrary schedule of various product types in an HLPS. To verify the optimal solution, a reconfigurable Colored Petri Net (CPN) model is developed for a simple X85 pallet system. For various cases of machine processing times, the optimal number of pallets is obtained for the suggested framework