(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-05)
Bao, Wencang; McGinnis, Leon F.; Roberto Campos Murcia, Miguel; Liu, Zhihan; Maurice, Julien; Montreuil, Benoit; Babalou, Sevda
Modern assembly factories increasingly encounter the challenges posed by highly diversified products and fluctuating market demand. Hyperconnected mobile production, which organizes the core production equipment in standard production modules and allows them to be shared among multiple participants in the Physical Internet, is a solution in response to these challenges. In this paper, we adapt the hyperconnected mobile production concept to the assembly industry and introduce a fractal layout design. In our design, a fractal center is a standard assembly module with a predetermined throughput rate and is equipped to assemble all variants of products. All assembly tasks of an individual product, from subassembly to finishing, are performed in one fractal center. In addition, fractal centers employ mobile material handling and assembly equipment and operators that do not have to continuously occupy fixed locations. We illustrate the shareability, scalability, reconfigurability, and adaptability of the proposed hyperconnected modular design and present a design framework for fractal centers.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-06)
Babalou, Sevda; Bao, Wencang; Montreuil, Benoit; McGinnis, Leon F.; Buckley, Shannon; Barenji, Ali
This paper employs modularity and mobility (M2) for designing recently introduced hyperconnected logistics hubs (HLH) for the Physical Internet, where parcels are encapsulated in modular tote-sized containers arriving in mobile racks, and these totes are consolidated by switching totes in shuffling cells to mobile racks with other totes with shared next destinations. The paper introduces the M2 framework and its modular standard-sized cells, racks and tote containers. Building on the overall HLH concept, the proposed M2 hub design is a major step forward with its on-the-fly transformability through operations to adapt to the dynamically changing sizes, mixes, characteristics, and flow of modular containers entering the hub and being consolidated and shipped within a short dwell time target. The paper uses a detailed case study to demonstrate the induced adaptability, adjustability, agility, efficiency, resilience, and scalability, and then it reports on an exploratory simulation experiment contrasting the performance of M2designs
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-06)
Montreuil, Benoit; McGinnis, Leon F.; Buckley, Shannon; Babalou, Sevda; Bao, Wencang; Beranji, Ali
Today, parcel logistics hubs, where packages come in from many origins and are sorted to their many destinations, are both capital and labor intensive, with capacity that is largely determined by investments in conveyors. In this paper, in the context of Physical Internet growth, we propose a next-generation hyperconnected parcel hub concept that leverages parcel containerized consolidation, does not use conveyors, is robot-centric, with minimal requirement for human operators. Hub capacity can be readily adjusted to accommodate changing logistics patterns. The hub concept is described along with a demonstration case study, the fundamental hub design and operational decisions are identified, and a research roadmap is defined.