This paper is aimed at comparing cellular manufacturing with focused cellular manufacturing. We define focused cellular manufacturing as a layout scheme that groups components by end‐items and forms cells of machines to fabricate and assemble end‐items. It is not classified as a cellular...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the actual benefits of radio frequency identification (RFID) on supply chain performance through the empirical evidence. Design/methodology/approach – The research reviews and classifies the existing quantitative empirical evidence of...

For many years, facilities location problems have attracted a great deal of attention in the literature. As a result, there is now a variety of methods for solving these problems. However, due to the recent interest, little research is found relating to the issues concerning international...

This paper reports the results of our collaborative work with Changde Telecommunication Equipment Company (CTEC) which produces digital transfer control systems for telephone networks. The manufacturing operations consist of two principle stages of module production and system assembly. Critical...

This paper introduces an efficient branch and bound algorithm for a special class of mixed integer programming problems called the warehouse location problem. A set of branching decision rules is proposed for selecting warehouses to be constrained open and closed from any node of the branch and...

This paper describes an efficient solution procedure for the warehouse location problem in which limitations on the amount of goods which can be handled are also imposed. The proposed branch-and-bound solution method is made efficient by developing dominance, lower and upper bounding procedures...

The conventional approach to the assembly line balancing problem assumes that the manufacturing methods to be used have been predetermined. However, in practice the design engineer has several alternatives available in the choice of processing, typically involving a trade-off between labor or...

The multi-asset investment renewal problem is characterized by two types of costs: transaction costs incurred when any renewal takes place at a point in time, and investment costs which are associated with renewing individual assets. A discrete-time version of this renewal scheduling problem is...