Performance Optimization in Intelligent Manufacturing - Decision Support System for Value Engineering in Flour Mills

Jürg P. Keller, Mukul Agarwal

2013

Abstract

The performance of modern flour mills depends crucially on value-engineering decisions involving optimal mixing of up to 80 intermediate product streams into at most 6 final product streams during continuous operation. Optimal mixing decision depends on given physical properties and yields of intermediate streams, goals and constraints on physical properties and yields of final streams, physical and quality constraints on mixing decision variables, and qualitative judgments relating value of final streams to their physical properties. In a previous work, the authors presented an interactive tool that guided the production personnel towards an optimal decision for fractions of each intermediate stream that should be piped to each final stream. This tool could exploit multiple Linear Programming computations and graphic user-interface to enable scenario overview and manoeuvring with no perceptible time lag. However, it cannot be used in a majority of flour mills where each intermediate stream is diverted to a single final stream using physical flaps. The mixed-integer programming required in this case renders the tool too slow for interactive use. In this work, a new tool is developed for the prevalent case of discrete decision variables, which enables computations and graphic interface for scenario manoeuvring without prohibitive time lag.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Keller J. and Agarwal M. (2013). Performance Optimization in Intelligent Manufacturing - Decision Support System for Value Engineering in Flour Mills . In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO, ISBN 978-989-8565-71-6, pages 495-504. DOI: 10.5220/0004431204950504

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco13,
author={Jürg P. Keller and Mukul Agarwal},
title={Performance Optimization in Intelligent Manufacturing - Decision Support System for Value Engineering in Flour Mills},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO,},
year={2013},
pages={495-504},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004431204950504},
isbn={978-989-8565-71-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO,
TI - Performance Optimization in Intelligent Manufacturing - Decision Support System for Value Engineering in Flour Mills
SN - 978-989-8565-71-6
AU - Keller J.
AU - Agarwal M.
PY - 2013
SP - 495
EP - 504
DO - 10.5220/0004431204950504