Modern factories and warehouses have a strong need for efficient movement of material through their various systems.  Inefficiency in the handling and movement of material generally leads to degraded ability to produce or ship goods.  Hence, an important component of facility design and operation is the material handling system (MHS).  In a factory, the MHS moves products between workcells, where they undergo various processing or assembly operations needed to produce a finished product.  In a warehouse, the MHS receives and stores incoming goods, and then it picks goods from storage, organizes them into orders, and prepares them to be shipped to consumers.

Material handling systems occur in a variety of forms.  One of the most commonly used is the conveyor.  Examples include roller conveyors, belt conveyors and even overhead conveyors.  Others include vehicle systems with drivers (forklifts) and vehicle systems without drivers (automated guided vehicles).  Material handling systems often automate a large-scale process that involves material movement.  Consider a warehouse, which involves storage and then later retrieval of items that will constitute customer orders.  The storage and retrieval functions can be automated by an automated storage/retrieval system (AS/RS), which consists of a set of cranes, each of which moves along an aisle of the warehouse performing storage and retrieval operations of unit-load items.

In today's manufacturing and distribution environment, it is important to be able to specify a material handling system quickly.  Given a set of requirements and specific material handling tasks, which material handling technology should we select?  Given a technology, which specific equipment should be chosen, and how much equipment should be purchased to ensure that we have adequate capacity to move material through our system?  How should we control the material handling system to ensure efficient operation?  These are important topics for today's engineering students.  In the past, engineering education has relied on small-scale examples and analytic models that focus on specific problems to educate students about these issues.  While useful, these approaches simply do not capture the scale and scope of the design problems that exist in today's complex systems, which are increasingly digital and integrated.  What is needed to address this issue is a set of computational tools that let the student solve large-scale problems, while at the same time providing instruction in the methodologies used to solve the design problems.

This site provides a set of self-paced tutorials for design of specific types of systems.  Each tutorial provides a web-based computational tool, plus information on the methodologies implemented within the tool to aid the designer.  The student may experiment with the computational tool to design systems to meet various requirements.

Background

• Credits
• Acknowledgments

Related Links

• Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA)
• Warehousing Education and Research Council (WERC)