THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS. By Oscar Kempthorne. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1952. 631 pp. $8.50. This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for \"experimenters\") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment. It is necessary to have some facility with algebraic notation and manipulation to be able to use the volume intelligently. The problems are presented from the theoretical point of view, without such practical examples as would be helpful for those not acquainted with mathematics. The mathematical justification for the techniques is given. As a somewhat advanced treatment of the design and analysis of experiments, this volume will be interesting and helpful for many who approach statistics theoretically as well as practically. With emphasis on the \"why,\" and with description given broadly, the author relates the subject matter to the general theory of statistics and to the general problem of experimental inference. MARGARET J. ROBERTSON

The Design and Analysis of Experiments

In the last four decades the container as an essential part of a unit-load-concept has achieved undoubted importance in international sea freight transportation. With ever increasing containerization the number of seaport container terminals and competition among them have become quite remarkable. Operations are nowadays unthinkable without effective and efficient use of information technology as well as appropriate optimization (operations research) methods. In this paper we describe and classify the main logistics processes and operations in container terminals and present a survey of methods for their optimization.

Container terminal operation and operations research — a classification and literature review

Risk management plays a vital role in effectively operating supply chains in the presence of a variety of uncertainties. Over the years, many researchers have focused on supply chain risk management (SCRM) by contributing in the areas of defining, operationalising and mitigating risks. In this paper, we review and synthesise the extant literature in SCRM in the past decade in a comprehensive manner. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we present and categorise SCRM research appearing between 2003 and 2013. Second, we undertake a detailed review associated with research developments in supply chain risk definitions, risk types, risk factors and risk management/mitigation strategies. Third, we analyse the SCRM literature in exploring potential gaps.

https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/118650/8.pdf

Supply chain risk management: a literature review

Many manufacturing facilities generate and update production schedules, which are plans that state when certain controllable activities (e.g., processing of jobs by resources) should take place. Production schedules help managers and supervisors coordinate activities to increase productivity and reduce operating costs. Because a manufacturing system is dynamic and unexpected events occur, rescheduling is necessary to update a production schedule when the state of the manufacturing system makes it infeasible. Rescheduling updates an existing production schedule in response to disruptions or other changes. Though many studies discuss rescheduling, there are no standard definitions or classification of the strategies, policies, and methods presented in the rescheduling literature. This paper presents definitions appropriate for most applications of rescheduling manufacturing systems and describes a framework for understanding rescheduling strategies, policies, and methods. This framework is based on a wide variety of experimental and practical approaches that have been described in the rescheduling literature. The paper also discusses studies that show how rescheduling affects the performance of a manufacturing system, and it concludes with a discussion of how understanding rescheduling can bring closer some aspects of scheduling theory and practice.

/pdf/rescheduling-manufacturing-systems-a-framework-of-strategies-2ihvpab9tj.pdf

Rescheduling Manufacturing Systems: A Framework of Strategies, Policies, and Methods

In most real-world environments, scheduling is an ongoing reactive process where the presence of a variety of unexpected disruptions is usually inevitable, and continually forces reconsideration and revision of pre-established schedules. Many of the approaches developed to solve the problem of static scheduling are often impractical in real-world environments, and the near-optimal schedules with respect to the estimated data may become obsolete when they are released to the shop floor. This paper outlines the limitations of the static approaches to scheduling in the presence of real-time information and presents a number of issues that have come up in recent years on dynamic scheduling.

The paper defines the problem of dynamic scheduling and provides a review of the state-of-the-art of currently developing research on dynamic scheduling. The principles of several dynamic scheduling techniques, namely, heuristics, meta-heuristics, multi-agent systems, and other artificial intelligence techniques are described in detail, followed by a discussion and comparison of their potential.

/pdf/a-survey-of-dynamic-scheduling-in-manufacturing-systems-1u4bc63f51.pdf

A survey of dynamic scheduling in manufacturing systems

We develop a search procedure for project scheduling problems with multiple resource constraints as well as precedence constraints. The procedure is applied to three popular search heuristics, simulated annealing, tabu search and genetic algorithms. In the heuristics, a solution is represented with a string of numbers each of which denotes priority of each activity. The priorities are used to select an activity for scheduling among competing ones. The search heuristics with this encoding method can always generate feasible neighbourhood solutions for a given solution. Moreover, this encoding method is very flexible in that problems with objective functions of a general functional form (such as a nonlinear function) and complex constraints can be considered without much difficulty. Results of computational tests on the performance of the search heuristics showed that the search heuristics, especially the simulated annealing and tabu search algorithms worked better than existing heuristics.

Search Heuristics for Resource Constrained Project Scheduling

A systematic procedure for setting parameters in simulated annealing algorithms

Simulation-based real-time scheduling in a flexible manufacturing system

This paper focuses on lot release control and scheduling problems in a semiconductor wafer fab producing multiple products that have different due dates and different process flows. For lot release control, it is necessary to determine the type of a wafer lot and the time to release wafers into the wafer fab, while it is necessary to determine sequences of processing waiting lots in front of workstations for lot scheduling. New dispatching rules are developed for lot release control and scheduling considering special features of the wafer fabrication process. Simulation experiments are carried out to test the dispatching rules. Results show that lot release control and lot scheduling at photolithography workstations are more important than scheduling at other workstations. Also, it is shown that new dispatching rules work better in terms of tardiness of orders than existing rules such as the EDD (earliest due date) rule and other well-known dispatching rules for multimachine scheduling.

Due-date based scheduling and control policies in a multiproduct semiconductor wafer fabrication facility

We consider a stowage-planning problem of arranging containers on a container ship in the maritime transportation system. Since containers are accessible only from the top of the stack, temporary unloading and reloading of containers, called shifting, is unavoidable if a container required to be unloaded at the current port is stacked under containers to be unloaded at later ports on the route of the ship. The objective of the stowage planning problem is to minimize the time required for shifting and crane movements on a tour of a container ship while maintaining the stability of the ship. For the problem, we develop a heuristic solution method in which the problem is divided into two subproblems, one for assigning container groups into the holds and one for determining a loading pattern of containers assigned to each hold. The former subproblem is solved by a greedy heuristic based on the transportation simplex method, while the latter is solved by a tree search method. These two subproblems are solved iteratively using information obtained from solutions of each other. To see the performance of the suggested algorithm, computational tests are performed on problem instances generated based on information obtained from an ocean container liner. Results show that the suggested algorithm works better than existing algorithms.

Yeong-Dae Kim

Papers

Search Heuristics for Resource Constrained Project Scheduling

A systematic procedure for setting parameters in simulated annealing algorithms

Simulation-based real-time scheduling in a flexible manufacturing system

Due-date based scheduling and control policies in a multiproduct semiconductor wafer fabrication facility

Stowage planning in maritime container transportation