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This chapter explains the impact containerisation has on the various partners of the global supply chain and the challenges companies encounter and the solutions they use in dealing with empty container repositioning.

The phenomenon of imbalanced container flows and its impact on shipping lines, shippers, container haulage companies, port development and the economy are presented. Special attention is given to explain the many solutions companies use to reduce the impact of empty container repositioning, hence tracing out the past research that led to these solutions and pointing to potentially new research directions in the future.

Because of the widespread use of containerisation and the imbalanced container flows that results from globalisation, empty container repositioning will be an ongoing issue for the maritime logistics industry. Many solutions are being used, but there is room for improvement and more research is needed.

Empty container repositioning is an important issue but has not been deemed as such in the literature. This chapter explains the reasons it is important and that its impact is not limited to shipping lines only but affects the whole supply chain.

Many manufacturers are considering the just‐in‐time (JIT) philosophy in order to become more competitive in global markets. An important element of the JIT strategy is the purchasing function. The procurement of parts and materials plays a key role in the successful implementation of a JIT strategy because it has a direct impact on increased productivity, reduced costs and improved quality. Experts agree that supplier selection is one of the most important activities of purchasing. Three popular methods for supplier performance evaluation appear in the literature: categorical, weighted point and cost ratio. However, these techniques have disadvantages associated with them and an alternative approach is suggested which applies dimensional analysis to selecting prospective suppliers. An international purchasing office (IPO), located in Hong Kong, has been applying the dimensional analysis approach to assessing suppliers. Using the IPO as a case study, the benefits of this approach over the traditional assessment methods are discussed, both as a means of measuring not only supplier performance, but also the contribution to the purchasing relationship from the buyer organisation.

In recent decades there has been much interest and activity in the application of mathematical ideas for controlling inventory. However most of this has been related to the control of stock products whose demand is smooth and continuous. When demand is lumpy these methods are inefficient in their attempts to minimise thé operating cost. A simple regression model is developed for computing optimal (s, S) policies for items with lumpy demand patterns. Continuous review of inventory level is assumed and the lead time demand is approximated by the stuttering Poisson distribution. A grid of 864 known optimal policies has been used to provide the data for the calibration of the regression models. Numerical models are used to illustrate this approach. Extensive computational results show that this model provides excellent performance in estimating the optimal values of the control parameters s and S for wide ranges of demand and cost parameters.

Information sharing and coordination between buyer and vendor have been considered as useful strategies to improve supply chain performance. The debate is about what information to share and how to share most cost‐effectively to maximize the mutual benefits of the supply chain as a whole and the individual business players. Proposes a systematic framework for investigating the impacts of sharing production information on the supply chain dynamic performance. This framework supports supply chain researches to study impacts of information sharing under various scenarios. Examines, under the framework, an inventory allocation problem in an arborescent distribution supply chain with two distribution channels competing for the same source of supply. Finds that the levels of benefits by sharing information vary with different players involved in the supply chain. Suggests some guidelines to balance the benefits in a supply chain in order to motivate information sharing.

The management of engineering changes (ECs) entails serious resource implications in all manufacturing companies, because nearly all the functions of the organisations will be involved. Indeed, these functions may be the sources and also the victims of ECs. Manufacturing companies have to cater for these ECs by adjusting their activities constantly. The robustness of manufacturing can be crippled by ineffective and inefficient management of ECs, irrespective of the advances in manufacturing technologies. This paper studies the current industrial practices in managing ECs in the UK manufacturing industries. The study draws reference from a comprehensive investigation carried out in 1996 within 100 UK manufacturing companies. Numerous aspects have been examined, including the systems, organisations, activities, influential factors, strategies, techniques, and computer aids. One major concern is the balance between the effectiveness and efficiency of the engineering change management (ECM) system. The findings reveal that guidelines for good ECM practices are required for the majority of the companies involved in the study. The study has also shown clearly that ECM has not attracted sufficient attention in research despite its industrial relevance.

Purpose: Technological innovations and frameworks that provide a framework for unification have evolved to improve information exchange across organisational units and information security. These integration technologies share and communicate information using defined protocols and different data. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a significant emerging approach that enables modular design solution construction.

Methodology: These designs are beneficial when many apps operating on different architectures and networks need to connect. A well-defined strategy and company-specific guidelines are essential for ensuring the firm’s systematic adoption of such an architecture. The critical components of MASSOASCM ‘(Multi-Agent System Service Oriented Architecture Supply Chain Management’ are a multi-agent system (MAS), a service-oriented structure, and supplier management. The MASSOASCM model has been made, and a production unit has been made to show how it works.

Findings: It has been stated that it saves development costs, and inventory management, all of which are critical concerns in any company. Our goal is to create an inventory control approach that relies on MAS and SOA but also a simulation that demonstrates how it works and may enhance Supply Chain Management (SCM) productivity in a production plant.

Practical Implications: The SCM implementation comprises three different services: SCM, SOA, and MAS. These facilities are constructed, maintained, planned, and implemented individually before being brought together collectively using MAS and SOA techniques.

An effective system development paradigm and its associated design tools can streamline the production of flexible manufacturing systems. In view of the technological advances in developing complex manufacturing systems, a framework and its associated graphical development environment are presented in this paper. This framework aims at providing a unified platform to develop complex manufacturing systems with enhanced formality. Features include procedures for requirement analysis, simulation of system behavior, and formal verification of abstract implementation. The proposed framework helps to shorten lifecycle for system designs and helps engineers to produce manufacturing systems that conform better with original specifications with better quality. A flexible conveyor‐based production system is chosen as a case example to illustrate the capabilities of the proposed framework.

The purpose of this paper is to review, evaluate and classify the academic research that has been published in facility layout problems (FLPs) and to analyse how researches and practices on FLPs are.

The review is based on 166 papers published from 1953 to 2021 in international peer-reviewed journals. The literature review on FLPs is presented under broader headings of discrete space and continuous space FLPs. The important formulations of FLPs under static and dynamic environments represented in the discrete and continuous space are presented. The articles reported in the literature on various representations of facilities for the continuous space Unequal Area Facility Layout Problems (UA-FLPs) are summarized. Discussed and commented on adaptive and robust approaches for dynamic environment FLPs. Highlighted the application of meta-heuristic solution methods for FLPs of a larger size.

It is found that most of the earlier research adopted the discrete space for the formulation of FLPs. This type of space representation for FLPs mostly assumes an equal area for all facilities. UA-FLPs represented in discrete space yield irregular shape facilities. It is also observed that the recent works consider the UA-FLPs in continuous space. The solution of continuous space UA-FLPs is more accurate and realistic. Some of the recent works on UA-FLPs consider the flexible bay structure (FBS) due to its advantages over the other representations. FBS helps the proper design of aisle structure in the detailed layout plan. Further, the recent articles reported in the literature consider the dynamic environment for both equal and unequal area FLPs to cope with the changing market environment. It is also found that FLPs are Non-deterministic Polynomial-complete problems, and hence, they set the challenges to researchers to develop efficient meta-heuristic methods to solve the bigger size FLPs in a reasonable time.

Due to the extremely large number of papers on FLPs, a few papers may have inadvertently been missed. The facility layout design research domain is extremely vast which covers other areas such as cellular layouts, pick and drop points and aisle structure design. This research review on FLPs did not consider the papers published on cellular layouts, pick and drop points and aisle structure design. Despite the possibility of not being all-inclusive, the authors firmly believe that most of the papers published on FLPs are covered and the general picture presented on various approaches and parameters of FLPs in this paper are precise and trustworthy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper reviews and classifies the literature on FLPs for the first time under the broader headings of discrete space and continuous space representations. Many important formulations of FLPs under static and dynamic environments represented in the discrete and continuous space are presented. This paper also provides the observations from the literature review and identifies the prospective future directions.

The flexibility of an automated manufacturing system (AMS) is largely determined by the architecture of its supervisory software. The AMS supervisory software should be compatible enough to allow re‐configuration, maintenance, and upgrading to be done at a reasonable cost, so as to prolong the life span of the AMS, and to maintain its value and success. In this connection, the application of software engineering methodologies is to introduce better management of AMS software development, with a view to providing some structure and formality to express, analyse, and produce them. This paper presents an object‐oriented methodology to address the task of AMS supervisory software development. The effectiveness of the methodology is examined in an extensive case study of the development of the supervisory software for a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) that contains a robot and an AGV.

Computer aided process planning (CAPP) is generally acknowledged as a significant activity to achieve computer‐integrated manufacturing (CIM). In coping with the dynamic changes in the modern manufacturing environment, the awareness of developing intelligent CAPP systems has to be raised, in an attempt to generate more successful implementations of intelligent manufacturing systems. In this paper, the architecture of a hybrid intelligent inference model for implementing the intelligent CAPP system is developed. The detailed structure for such a model is also constructed. The establishment of the hybrid intelligent inference model will enable the CAPP system to adapt automatically to the dynamic manufacturing environment, with a view to the ultimate realization of full implementation of intelligent manufacturing systems in enterprises.