• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.169-175
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• 2010

Recently, to improve operating efficiency with the higher in-line rate in automated production lines, a lot of cases of grouping machines and material handling system together to form a cluster has shown frequently. This article addresses the job allocation and operation method of automated material handling for cluster-type production systems. First of all, the control problems of the automated material handling systems are classified into the control problem of inter-cluster material handling system and that of intra-cluster material handling system. Then, a distributed agent-based control scheme is proposed for the former, and an operational control procedure for the latter. Simulation experiment shows that the proposed method is efficient in reducing cycle times and improving utilization of material handling vehicles.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2013.05a
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• pp.657-658
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• 2013

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.131-141
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• 2012

The automated material handling systems today are playing ever more important roles in semiconductor/LCD fabrication facilities. Recently they became more flexible, intelligent, and speedy than in the past. The facilities have been fully automated because the size and weight of the unit loads used in the facilities were being increased beyond the limits that a human operator can handle. This research develops an efficient procedure to streamline the delivery of unit loads by the automated material handling system (AMHS). For this task, the research employs the event scheduling theory that has been successfully used in the both academia and industry. The developed procedure was applied to an actual LCD fabrication facility and improved the performance of an existing material handling system.

• IE interfaces
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.431-443
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• 2005

This paper describes a web-based system called DESIGNER for the analysis and design for automated material handling equipment(MHE) applications in manufacturing. DESIGNER models the processes for system integration, economic analysis, performance analysis, and automated storage/retrieval system(AS/RS) design. Based on the information specified by users, the various analysis modules are invoked to meet the needs of the material handling applications. The results of the analyses provide system users with useful data for material handling system design and decision on investment in automated MHE. Example problems are also presented to demonstrate the use of the system.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.834-841
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• 2006

Recently, many enterprises are installing AMSs(Automated Manufacturing Systems) for their competitive advantages. As the level of automation increases, proper design and validation of control logic is a imperative task for the successful operation of AMSs. However, current discrete event simulation methods mainly focus on the performance evaluation. As a result, they lack the modeling capabilities for the detail logic of automated manufacturing system controller. Proposed in this paper is a method of validation of the controller logic for automated material handling system using an object-oriented design and simulation. Using this method, FA engineers can validate the controller logic easily in earlier stage of system design, so they can reduce the time for correcting the logic errors and enhance the productivity of control program development Generated simulation model can also be used as a communication tool among FA engineers who have different experiences and disciplines.

• Journal of the Korean Wood Science and Technology
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.71-80
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• 1996

Handling the manufacured goods is the most cost-consuming task in material handling system in wooden furniture industries. Fully automated warehouse for cartoned goods of a furniture manufacturing company was analized to provide plant engineers and managers with some important informations on the utility and profitability of the automated storage and retrieval system(AS/RS). Process-oriented simulation modeling tech-niques were used to describe the system and to propose some alternatives to promote the efficiency of AS/RS. Simulation report could be inter-preted as follows: 1. Warehouse for the furniture goods must be designed in accordance with reliable material handling program and constructed with suitable equipments depending on the specification of packed products. 2. An excess of palletized products induced the indigestion and the inefficiency of AS/RS of the furniture industry and put this high-costly system into the shade. 3. Overcrowded AS/RS of the furniture factories could regain its material handling function by cutting down the deposit of products into the automated warehouse. For this purpose, reducing the regular output and direct delivering the outside products to the destination should be considered as the definite counterplan. And additional operation of conventional handy warehouse was also expected to improve the efficiency of main AS/RS.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.3
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• pp.478-487
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• 2018

Pyroprocessing technology has been regarded as a promising solution for recycling spent fuel in nuclear power plants. The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute has been studying the current status of equipment and facilities for pyroprocessing and found that existing facilities are manually operated; therefore, their applications have been limited to laboratory scale because of low productivity and safety concerns. To extend the pyroprocessing technology to a commercial scale, the facility, including all the processing equipment and the material-handling devices, should be enhanced in view of automation. In an automated pyroprocessing facility, a supervised control system is needed to handle and manage material flow and associated operations. This article provides a preliminary design of the supervising system for pyroprocessing. In particular, a manufacturing execution system intended for an automated pyroprocessing facility, named Pyroprocessing Execution System, is proposed, by which the overall production process is automated via systematic collaboration with a planning system and a control system. Moreover, a simulation-based prototype system is presented to illustrate the operability of the proposed Pyroprocessing Execution System, and a simulation study to demonstrate the interoperability of the material-handling equipment with processing equipment is also provided.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.40-48
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• 2022

An automated material handling system (AMHS) has been emerging as an important factor in the semiconductor wafer manufacturing industry. In general, an automated guided vehicle (AGV) in the Fab's AMHS travels hundreds of miles on guided paths to transport a lot through hundreds of operations. The AMHS aims to transfer wafers while ensuring a short delivery time and high operational reliability. Many linear and analytic approaches have evaluated and improved the performance of the AMHS under a deterministic environment. However, the analytic approaches cannot consider a non-linear, non-convex, and black-box performance measurement of the AMHS owing to the AMHS's complexity and uncertainty. Unexpected vehicle congestion increases the delivery time and deteriorates the Fab's production efficiency. In this study, we propose a Q-Learning based dynamic routing algorithm considering vehicle congestion to reduce the delivery time. The proposed algorithm captures time-variant vehicle traffic and decreases vehicle congestion. Through simulation experiments, we confirm that the proposed algorithm finds an efficient path for the vehicles compared to benchmark algorithms with a reduced mean and decreased standard deviation of the delivery time in the Fab's AMHS.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.18 no.35
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• pp.139-155
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• 1995

This study is concerned with the economic analysis of implementing a material handling system using automated guided vehicle(AGV)s in order to improve the productivity of the production process of chinawares. Analytic hierarchy process(AHP) method for selecting the facilities of material handling systems is presented. Subsequently, as an example, a chinaware production line is analyzed for the economic analysis. The result shows that seven manpowers can be reduced. However the introduction of the new material handling system is turn out to be undesirable due to high initial cost of AGV system, Nevertheless, in the long term, automatic material handling system such as AGV system are expected to play major roles in the modern manufacturing area.

• IE interfaces
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.57-65
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• 1997

Less researches on AGV(Automated Guided Vehicle) path configurations have been conducted so far while more studies have been placed in determining AGV guide path directions and pick-up/drop-off station locations, and routing/dispatching/scheduling strategies. In practice plenty of concerns fall in preventing deadlock and simplifying AGV system control through an appropriate AGV path configuration. In order to meet those requirements, a new AGV path configuration, inter-loop stocker type is introduced here. The stocker serves as relaying material between loops as well as stocking material. Automated material handling systems using AGVs play an important role in semiconductor industry including TFT LCD and memory/non-memory chip. A practical example of implementing the inter-loop stocker concept successfully in the TFT LCD fab is presented in this paper.