Towards measuring the effectiveness of a facilities layout

Performance measurement models are essential to support various decision making problems that may arise during life cycle of a facilities layout. Available models are only suitable for early stages in the design phase of life cycle. However, measurement models have a great consequence in other phases also such as production planning, control and when modification to be incorporated due to the changes in market demand, which happens very often in today's global competition. In addition, the existing models have considered only material handling cost as the performance measurement factor. Nevertheless, the empty travel of material handling equipment, layout flexibility and area utiisation have a significant contribution towards the layout effectiveness. It is therefore necessary to have a measurement model to determine the facilities layout's effectiveness by considering all significant factors. A measurement model considering a set of three layout effectiveness factors-facilities layout flexibility (FLF), productive area utilisation (PAU) and closeness gap (CG)-is developed in our research. The proposed model will enable the decision-maker of a manufacturing enterprise to analyse a layout in three different aspects, based on which they can make a decision towards productivity improvement. This paper mainly discusses about the measurement of the CG. The CG is developed with respect to the objective of bringing closer the highly interactive facilities/departments. The CG presented in this paper extends other related works by incorporating numerous aspects of layout that include empty travel material handling equipment, information flow, personnel flow and equipment flow

Quantity of material handling equipment: A queuing theory based approach

In this paper, we discuss the development of a two step analytical approach to determine the quantity of material handling equipment (MHE) required for effective handling of products among facilities. In the first step, a preliminary solution is obtained by considering the time required for loading and unloading of products, loaded travelling, empty travelling and breakdown of MHE. A detailed model, which integrates both operational and cost performance factors such as utilisation of MHE, work-in-process at the MHS and life-cycle cost, is then utilised to rank alternatives that are generated from the preliminary solution. The stochastic nature of a manufacturing system, which is not adequately addressed in the literature, is best modelled using queuing theory. An illustrative problem is given, and it is shown that for all the considered problems our approach out performs the existing methods. The influence of various other factors including the operational characteristics of processing facilities, layout design, maintenance function, MHE speed and batch size in selection of the quantity of MHE is also demonstrated. Thus we show the significance of our proposed approach and its capability to support an integrated decision making process

Effectiveness measurement of facilities layout

Measuring effectiveness in an existing facilities layout is a prerequisite in order to initiate any action that will improve layout effectiveness. Available methods on measurement of layout effectiveness help measure it in respect to only material handling cost and select an effective layout from a set of available alternatives. Nevertheless, factors such as empty travel of material handling equipment, layout flexibility and area utilisation contribute significantly towards the layout effectiveness. Thus, it is necessary to have a measurement model to determine the facilities layout's effectiveness by considering all significant factors. Hence, a measurement model considering a set of three layout effectiveness factors namely Facilities Layout Flexibility (FLF), Productive Area Utilisation (PAU) and Closeness Gap (CG) is developed in our research. The proposed model will enable the decision-maker of a manufacturing enterprise to analyse a layout in three different aspects; based on which they can make decision towards productivity improvement. Due to the space limitation, this paper only discusses about the measurement of the CG. The CG is developed in respect to the objective of bringing closer the highly interactive facilities/departments. The CG presented in this paper extends other related works by incorporating numerous aspects of layout that include: empty travel of material handling equipment, information flow, personnel flow and equipment flow

Current Perspectives on Viable but Non-Culturable Foodborne Pathogenic Bacteria: A Review

Foodborne diseases caused by foodborne pathogens pose risks to food safety. Effective detection and efficient inactivation of pathogenic bacteria has always been a research hotspot in the field of food safety. Complicating these goals, bacteria can be induced to adopt a viable but non-culturable (VBNC) state under adverse external environmental stresses. When in the VBNC state, pathogens cannot form visible colonies during traditional culture but remain metabolically active and toxic. The resulting false negative results in growth-related assays can jeopardize food safety. This review summarizes the latest research on VBNC foodborne pathogens, including induction conditions, detection methods, mechanism of VBNC formation, and possible control strategies. It is hoped that this review can provide ideas and methods for future research on VBNC foodborne pathogenic bacteria

Controllable image captioning with feature refinement and multilayer fusion

Image captioning is the task of automatically generating a description of an image. Traditional image captioning models tend to generate a sentence describing the most conspicuous objects, but fail to describe a desired region or object as human. In order to generate sentences based on a given target, understanding the relationships between particular objects and describing them accurately is central to this task. In detail, information-augmented embedding is used to add prior information to each object, and a new Multi-Relational Weighted Graph Convolutional Network (MR-WGCN) is designed for fusing the information of adjacent objects. Then, a dynamic attention decoder module selectively focuses on particular objects or semantic contents. Finally, the model is optimized by similarity loss. The experiment on MSCOCO Entities demonstrates that IANR obtains, to date, the best published CIDEr performance of 124.52% on the Karpathy test split. Extensive experiments and ablations on both the MSCOCO Entities and the Flickr30k Entities demonstrate the effectiveness of each module. Meanwhile, IANR achieves better accuracy and controllability than the state-of-the-art models under the widely used evaluation metric.</p

Longitudinal double-spin asymmetry and cross section for inclusive jet production in polarized proton collisions at square root of s = 200 GeV

We report a measurement of the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry A(LL) and the differential cross section for inclusive midrapidity jet production in polarized proton collisions at s=200 GeV. The cross section data cover transverse momenta 5 < p(T)< 50 GeV/c and agree with next-to-leading order perturbative QCD evaluations. The A(LL) data cover 5 < p(T)< 17 GeV/c and disfavor at 98% C.L. maximal positive gluon polarization in the polarized nucleon