Presents a miniature robotic system ("scout") useful for reconnaissance and surveillance missions. A large number of scout robots are deployed and controlled by humans and/or larger "ranger" robots. The specially designed and constructed scouts are extremely small (roughly 116cc volume) yet are readily deployable (by tossing or launching), have multiple mobility modes, have multiple sensing capabilities, can transmit and receive data and instructions, and have a limited capability for autonomous action. The rangers are significantly larger vehicles, based on a commercial-off-the-shelf platform, augmented with scout launchers, radios, and additional sensors. Together, the scouts and rangers form a hierarchical team capable of carrying out complex missions in a wide variety of environments.

We present a formulation of the plant layout problem where the objective is to minimize work-in-process. We show that the choice of layout has a direct impact on work-in-process accumulation, manufacturing lead time, achievable throughput rates, and required material handling capacity. More importantly, we show that layouts generated using a queueing-based model can be very different from those obtained using conventional layout procedures.

In this paper, we address the problem of designing flexible plant layouts for manufacturing facilities where product demands are subject to variability. We extend existing procedures for layout design by: (1) explicitly capturing the stochastic nature of product demands and the resulting material variability in flows between different processing departments; (2) allowing for the possibility of multiple processing departments of the same type to exist in the same facility; and (3) letting material flows between pairs of individual departments be determined simultaneously with the layout and as function of the demand scenarios.

In this paper, we examine the impact of scheduling policies on batch sizing decisions in a multiproduct manufacturing system. We also investigate the joint effect of scheduling policies and batch sizing decisions on manufacturing lead times. In particular we compare the performance of a first come-first-served (FCFS) policy with a group scheduling (GS) policy and study the effect of both on the optimal batch size.