Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

A Framework For Modeling Material Handling With Decentralized Control, Kai Furmans, Kevin R. Gue

15th IMHRC Proceedings (Savannah, Georgia. USA – 2018)

Despite decades of research in material handling, the academic community still has no accepted way of describing material handling requirements in a way that machines and algorithms can process them. Such a “way of describing” requires a language with which to describe requirements, objects, relationships between objects, and so on. We propose a modeling framework that differs from existing research in two ways: First, we address material handling modeling from the bottom up rather than from the top down, meaning we define a set of elementary functions and then combine them into processes and more complex relationships that allow us …