Optimisation Approaches in Material Flow Models of Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

For many years now highly developed models and software tools have been applied in ecological material flow analysis. They offer many possibilities for complex modelling of material flow systems, but do not take into account the approaches of Operations Research for optimising such systems with regard to objective functions to be selected to and within the context of existing constraints. A current research project combines the method of material flow nets, implemented in the software Umberto®, with corresponding optimising algorithms. The result offers a new look at real material flow systems and how they can be economically and ecologically improved.