Economic and Performance Analysis of Dual-bay Vertical Lift Modules

Warehouse picking is one of the most time and cost consuming activities in a warehouse, often requiring the presence of human operators, who travel within the aisles to retrieve the items needed by the customers. Several studies demonstrate that the travelling activity can represent even the 50% of the total picking time, with a subsequent creation of a separate storage and picking area for small objects. In the last years, new solutions for order picking systems have been developed, especially for small items. One of these solutions requires Vertical Lift Modules (VLMs), storage columns with extractable trays. In this paper, the employ of dual-bay VLMs, compared to a carton racks warehouse, has been analysed from an economic point of view. Some mathematical formulations have been developed, to estimate the total annual cost and the respective convenience limits of both systems, according to their productivity. Moreover, some useful guidelines for practitioners are derived

Economic and Performance Analysis of Dual-Bay Vertical Lift Modules

Poster

Panel Session #1: Production Logistics in the Industrie 4.0 Era

Panel Session 1 Panelists: Kai Furmans, Fabio Sgarbosse, Tone Lehrer Moderator: David Porte

preventing ergonomic risks with integrated planning on assembly line balancing and parts feeding

In this paper, we advise to perform assembly line balancing simultaneously with decision-making on parts feeding. Such integrated planning may open additional potential to reduce labour costs. Additional planning flexibility gained with the integrated planning may be used to mitigate ergonomic risks at workplaces. We formulate the integrated assembly line balancing and parts feeding planning problem, propose a mixed-integer model and compare integrated planning to a common hierarchical planning approach in a detailed case study on the assembly of a self-priming pump. Our case study illustrates that workplaces with high ergonomic risks may emerge even in productions that involve handling parts and workpieces of low weights and avoid static and awkward postures. We also show that the proposed integrated planning approach may eliminate excessive ergonomic risks and improve productivity indicators simultaneously

Conventional or additive manufacturing for spare parts management: An extensive comparison for Poisson demand

Due to the main peculiarities of spare parts, i.e. intermittent demands, long procurement lead times and high downtime costs when the parts are not available on time, it is often difficult to find the optimal inventory level. Recently, Additive Manufacturing (AM) has emerged as a promising technique to improve spare parts inventory management thanks to a ‘print on demand’ approach. So far, however, the impact of AM on spare parts inventory management has been little considered, and it is not yet clear when the use of AM for spare parts inventory management would provide benefits over Conventional Manufacturing (CM) techniques. With this paper we thus aim to contribute to the field of AM spare parts inventory management by developing decision trees that can be of support to managers and practitioners. To this aim, we considered a Poisson-based inventory management system and we carried out a parametrical analysis considering different part sizes and complexity, backorder costs and part consumption. Moreover, we evaluated scenarios where the order-up-to level is limited to resemble applications with a limited storage capacity. For the first time, the analysis was not limited to just one AM and one CM technique, but several AM and CM techniques were considered, also combined with different post-process treatments, for a total of nine different sourcing alternatives. In addition, the economic and technical performance of the different sourcing options were obtained thanks to an interdisciplinary approach, where experts from production economics and material science were brought together

On risk-based maintenance: A comprehensive review of three approaches to track the impact of consequence modelling for predicting maintenance actions

Since gas plants are progressively increasing near urban areas, a comprehensive tool to plan maintenance and reduce the risk arising from their operations is required. To this end, a comparison of three Risk-Based Maintenance methodologies able to point out maintenance priorities for the most critical components, is presented in this paper. Moreover, while the literature is mostly focused on probabilistic analysis, a particular attention is directed towards consequence analysis throughout this study. The first developed technique is characterized by a Hierarchical Bayesian Network to perform the occurrence analysis and a Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis to assess the magnitude of the adverse outcomes. The second approach is a Quantitative Risk Analysis carried out via a software named Safeti. Finally, another software called Synergi Plant is adopted for the third methodology, which provides a Risk-Based Inspection plan, through a semiquantitative risk analysis. The proposed study can assist asset manager in adopting the most appropriate methodology to their context, while highlighting priority components. To demonstrate the applicability of the approaches and compare their rankings, a Natural Gas Regulating and Measuring Station is considered as case study. The results showed that the most suited method strongly depends on the available data