• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.380-392
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• 2000

A typical production-distribution system consist of three main echelons representing the retailer, distributors, and a factory each with an on-site warehouse. The system is sufficiently general and realistic to represent many industrial situations. However, decision functions and parameters have been selected to apply particularly to the production and distribution of consumer durables. The flows included in the model are materials, orders, and those information flows needed to support the material and order-rate decisions. In this work, a realistic production-distribution system has been used as a basic model, which consists of three sectors: retailer, distributor, and factory. That system is a nonlinear 25th-order continuous system interconnected between the echelons. Using a modern control algorithm, a typical multi-echelon production-distribution system using a dynamic controller is numerically simulated in the nominal plant and in the perturbed plant when the piecewise constant manufacturing decision is limited by a factory manufacturing upper-limit due to capital equipment, manpower, and factory lotsize.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.369-379
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• 2000

In industrial production-distribution systems, production and purchasing rates, associated inventories, and sales are very critical for the profits of each component in the system. The objective of this study is to investigate an effective information control scheme for a production -distribution system by automatic feedback control techniques. In this work, a dynamic control scheme that has an integrated -error with state-feedback and filtering (ISFF) is proposed as a new algorithm for a dynamic controller. Generalized formulations of the dynamic control are proposed in the continuous-time and discrete-time cases. A methodology for an evaluation of ISFF controller gains using the eigen structure property is presented. When an upper-limit is imposed on the production capability by available factory space and capital equipment, supervisory control is provided to avoid integrator-windup and deterioration of system performance.

• IE interfaces
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.124-132
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• 2006

The system under study is a single item, multi-echelon distribution system with a capacitated production facility. All the nodes at the downstream ends are demand-sites, i.e., ordered items are delivered to the customers from the node. Also any transshipment depots in the midstream can be demand-sites as well. For a given planning period, at each of demand-site, demand is forecasted and known. Our objective is to minimize the average system cost per period which is the sum of holding and backorder costs in the entire network. Due to the capacity restrictions, it is difficult to establish efficient distribution planning. To overcome such a difficulty and obtain a reasonable and better solution, we convert this problem into a single machine earliness and weighted tardiness scheduling. We propose a simple but cost-effective heuristic for this problem. The experimental results showed that the proposed heuristic obtained much better solutions compared with another approach.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.374-384
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• 2016

The efficiency of a supply chain can be extremely affected by its design which includes determining the flow pattern of material from suppliers to costumers, selecting the suppliers, and defining the opened facilities in network. In this paper, a multi-objective multi-echelon multi-product supply chain design model is proposed in which several suppliers, several manufacturers, several distribution centers as different stages of supply chain cooperate with each other to satisfy various costumers' demands. The multi-objectives of this model which considered simultaneously are 1-minimize the total cost of supply chain including production cost, transportation cost, shortage cost, and costs of opening a facility, 2-minimize the transportation time from suppliers to costumers, and 3-maximize the service level of the system by minimizing the maximum level of shortages. To configure this model a graph theoretic approach is used by considering channels among each two facilities as links and each facility as the nodes in this configuration. Based on complexity of the proposed model a multi-objective Pareto-based vibration damping optimization (VDO) algorithm is applied to solve the model and finally non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) is also applied to evaluate the performance of MOVDO. The results indicated the effectiveness of the proposed MOVDO to solve the model.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.17-26
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• 2000

This paper presents an integrated order scheduling method with the improved DRP concept for multi-echelon distribution system that has the constraint of limited production capacity of producers. The proposed method reflects the dynamic characteristics of inventory level changes in the regional and central distribution center. The simulation is done with two models : the traditional DRP method and the proposed method presented in this paper. From the results, the latter is more efficient than the former in cost, customer's service level as well as balanced production load on each producer.