Critical Management Issues for Implementing RFID in Supply Chain Management

The benefits of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in the supply chain are fairly compelling. It has the potential to revolutionise the efficiency, accuracy and security of the supply chain with significant impact on overall profitability. A number of companies are actively involved in testing and adopting this technology. It is estimated that the market for RFID products and services will increase significantly in the next few years. Despite this trend, there are major impediments to RFID adoption in supply chain. While RFID systems have been around for several decades, the technology for supply chain management is still emerging. We describe many of the challenges, setbacks and barriers facing RFID implementations in supply chains, discuss the critical issues for management and offer some suggestions. In the process, we take an in-depth look at cost, technology, standards, privacy and security and business process reengineering related issues surrounding RFID technology in supply chains

Heuristic Solutions for Loading in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Production planning in flexible manufacturing system deals with the efficient organization of the production resources in order to meet a given production schedule. It is a complex problem and typically leads to several hierarchical subproblems that need to be solved sequentially or simultaneously. Loading is one of the planning subproblems that has to addressed. It involves assigning the necessary operations and tools among the various machines in some optimal fashion to achieve the production of all selected part types. In this paper, we first formulate the loading problem as a 0-1 mixed integer program and then propose heuristic procedures based on Lagrangian relaxation and tabu search to solve the problem. Computational results are presented for all the algorithms and finally, conclusions drawn based on the results are discussed

An Effective Heuristic for Minimizing Makespan on Unrelated Parallel Machines

Scheduling independent tasks on unrelated machines is a relatively difficult and challenging problem. In this paper, we develop a tabu search based heuristic for minimising makespan for the above problem that can provide good quality solutions for practical size problems within a reasonable amount of computational time. Our adaptation of this tabu search uses hashing to control the tabu restrictions of the search process and requires fewer critical parameters than many of the common tabu search approaches employed for combinatorial optimisation. Hashing is simple to implement and very effective in providing a near-optimal solution. Computational results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic

Radio frequency ID technology: The next revolution in SCM

A major advancement is taking place in supply chain management. Radio frequency identification technology has now been developed to the point at which it can provide suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers with precise realtime information on where their products are in the supply chain—information that can be valuable in terms of improving SCM efficiencies and revenue generation. Several companies in the food and consumer packaged goods industries are involved in one or more major RFID pilot programs. This article describes the critical trends and implications of applying this technology to SCM, detailing its benefits as well as the impediments to implementation

Radio Frequency ID Technology: The Next Revolution in SCM (BH153)

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An improved lower bound for the bin packing problem

AbstractThis paper unifies and generalizes the existing lower bounds for the one-dimensional bin packing problem. The generalization is motivated by and based on the work of Martello and Toth (this journal, 1990). The worst-case performance of the unified lower bound is analyzed and two new lower bounds are proposed and compared with existing lower bounds through numerical experiments

Batching in Production Planning for Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Generally, production planning in flexible manufacturing systems is hierarchically grouped into two subproblems: batching and loading. These two subproblems can be solved either sequentially or simultaneously to generate a feasible production plan. This paper focuses on the batching problem which partitions the given production order of part types into batches that can be processed with the limited production resources such as the capacity of the tool magazines, pallets, fixtures and available machine time. A 0–1 integer program is formulated to address the batching problem and a simulated annealing algorithm is proposed for solving it. A systematic computational test is conducted to test the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results show that the simulated annealing algorithm can provide high-quality solutions in a reasonable amount of time for practical size problems