Abstract
Wooden pallets are commonly used as load carriers in many industrial and logistic applications. This article investigates and formalizes the production planning for a highly automated but customized pallet production and provides a solution approach. For completing a specific pallet, the required boards must be cut and stacked in advance to meet the demand at the assembly line. The arising planning problem for producing the required boards consists of both a cutting stock and a constraining open stack problem. Further, both the changeover of raw material at the cutting process and the number of fully automated internal storages, for stacked boards, are restricted. The proposed solution heuristic aims at minimizing the cutting waste. Additionally, feasibility with regard to the buffers is tested using discrete event simulation. Different approaches to generate, select and sequence the cutting patterns are investigated.
Highlights
In many industries, wooden pallets are needed to transport cargo
This article investigates the production planning for a highly automated pallet production that produces pallets in small lots down to lot size one. This combination is rather new to this industry as normally large lots of standardized pallets are produced on specialised and automated production lines and small lots of customized pallets are produced with a high degree of manual labour involvement
The examined production process consists of cutting boards into smaller items, which are dedicated to a specific assembling order, can be made of several different raw materials and need to be combined to cutting patterns
Summary
Wooden pallets are needed to transport cargo. In contrast to the high volume production of standardized pallets, the production facility investigated here is producing disposable pallets in small batches. As step the stack is picked up by an automated handling system This system can bring it directly to the material feed or to the small buffer in front of it if it is one to be produced. Due to the limited number of stacks and as a stack can only be released when all items of a production batch are placed, the cutting patterns have to be selected and sequenced in a feasible order as part of production planning. The production schedule for the pallet assembling is generated by sorting from short to long in order to cope with arising setup times. These depend on the length delta of the top boards of two successive pallets. A simplified description of this planning problem and pre-tests are shown in Kaltenbrunner et al (2020)
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