【Time】 1:00PM-2:00PM, January 21, 2010 (Thursday) 

【Venue】 Meeting Room 510, Shunde Building 

【Speaker】 Mr. Kan Wu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA 

【Title】 Characterizing the Performance of Manufacturing Systems. 

【Abstract】 

      Characterizing the performance of manufacturing systems reliably is crucial in assessing the efficiency of supply chains. However, it’s very hard to do in general because of the non-renewal departure process among workstations. In practice, exact cycle times for manufacturing systems are notoriously difficult to compute except in some special cases; as a result, only approximate models are tractable. We describe a novel approximation approach developed by investigating the linkage between Jackson’s network and Friedman’s reduction principle. By understanding this linkage, we are able to deduce two new properties describing the dependence among servers in tandem queues, namely the intrinsic gap and intrinsic ratio, and develop a new approximation approach for estimating cycle times. This new approach largely outperforms earlier approximations which are based on the parametric decomposition and diffusion approximations. We also show how to extend the results from tandem queues to an entire manufacturing system, and test the extension using complicated simulation models from an industrial partner. The results demonstrate an amazing fidelity between the simulated cycle time curves and the estimates from our new approach.  

【About the Speaker】 

      Kan Wu received the M.S. degree in industrial engineering and operations research and the M.E. degree in nuclear engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. Afterwards, he was an IE consultant at Tefen, Ltd., and a senior engineer at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. During 2003 to 2005, he was an IE manager at Inotera Memories Inc. Currently he is a Ph.D candidate at the Steward School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is the principle inventor of five US patents, and has been a reviewer for IEEE TSM, IEEE TASE and EJOR. His research interests include production planning, scheduling, and dispatching in manufacturing systems. 

      Looking forward to your attendance.