The aim of this study is to identify the crucial logistics requirements and supply chain management (SCM) strategies for the dairy industry. For product or service development quality function deployment (QFD) is a useful approach to maximize customer satisfaction. The determination of design requirements and supply chain management strategies are important issues during QFD processes for product or service design. For this reason a fuzzy QFD methodology is proposed in this study to determine these ...

In this paper a preference-based interactive memetic random-key genetic algorithm (PIMRKGA) is developed and used to find (weakly) Pareto optimal solutions to manufacturing and production problems that can be modelled as a symmetric multi-objective travelling salesman problem. Since there are a large number of solutions to these kinds of problems to reduce the computational effort and to provide more desirable and meaningful solutions to the decision maker this research focuses on using interactive ...

Researchers often identify robust design as one of the most effective engineering design methods for continuous quality improvement. When more than one quality characteristic is considered an important question is how to trade off robust design solutions. In this paper we consider a bi-objective robust design problem for which Pareto solutions of two quality characteristics need to be obtained. In practical robust design applications a second-order polynomial model is adequate to accommodate the ...

This paper addresses the heat treatment operation in a manufacturing plant that produces different types of cylindrical parts. The immediate prior process to heat treatment is furnace-loading where parts are loaded into baskets. The furnace-loading process is complex and involves issues relating to geometry and heterogeneity in the parts and in their processing requirements. Currently furnace-loading is accomplished by operator ingenuity ; consequently the parts loaded in heat treatment often do ...

This research proposes a stochastic programming model to determine how supplies should be positioned and distributed among a network of cooperative warehouses. The model incorporates constraints that enforce equity in service while also considering traffic congestion resulting from possible evacuation behavior and time constraints for providing effective response. We make use of short-term information (e.g. hurricane forecasts) to more effectively preposition supplies in preparation for their ...

The problem of transportation in a disaster area can be seen broadly as having two aspects: (a) moving people and materials out of an area and (b) moving people and materiel into the same area. The common thread here is the use of a limited set of surface and air transportation gateways into and out of the area. The distributed routing problem here is that of assigning one from among the limited set of gateways to various transportation requests in real-time while maximizing some measure of success ...