Speaker: Andrea Pizzutti
Title: Cutting and unloading: management of a work center in iron manufacturing
Time: November 23 (Thursday), 12:30 – 13:30
Place: EA-409
Abstract:
This talk delves into an industrial case study based on an ongoing partnership with a leading firm specializing in the design and production of manufacturing work centers tailored for cutting iron bars in reinforcement processing. The work center, a sophisticated system comprising multiple components, relies on a sequential cutter that processes iron bars based on predetermined cutting stock patterns. The resulting parts are transferred via a conveyor belt to two temporary unloading stations, where they are grouped into homogeneous lots on the left and right.
These lots are then consolidated into orders within a stocking area, featuring identical parallel buffers, by using portals capable of longitudinal movements. Upon requests from downstream departments, these portals maneuver the orders to unloading tracks for departure from the work center.
The effective management of operations is addressed by using an iterative three-step optimization algorithm. Initially, a multi-start local search tackles a pattern sequencing subproblem to minimize order spread. Subsequently, a branch-and-bound procedure optimizes the arrangement of parts on unloading stations, aiming to reduce cutter breaks, portal movements, and side mismatches. Finally, a sequential value correction (SVC) heuristic manages the packing of dynamic lots in the stocking area. Integer linear programs are further defined for exactly modeling each subproblem.
The procedure yields a set of non-dominated solutions across various objective functions, encompassing cutter interruptions, order fragmentation, and portal operations. Preliminary computational experiments on representative industrial scenarios demonstrate the efficacy of this approach, as discussed through the obtained results.
Bio:
Andrea Pizzuti received a Bachelor’s degree in Computer and Automation Engineering (cum laude) in 2014 and a Master’s degree in Management Engineering (cum laude) in 2016 from Università Politecnica delle Marche (Ancona, Italy). In 2020, he defended his Ph.D. thesis titled Pricing-based primal and dual bounds for selected packing problems in Information Engineering – Operations Research at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione (DII) of Università Politecnica delle Marche. During his Ph.D., he was hosted at Nagoya University (Japan) as a special research student. He won the Best Student Paper Award at the 7th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems (ICORES). He was a member of the national research project New optimization models and algorithms for cutting, packing and nesting in manufacturing processes} founded by the MIUR of Italy. He worked on several projects involving industrial leading partners.
Currently, he is a Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Operations Research Applications (LORA) at DII led by Prof. Fabrizio Marinelli. His research activity is focused on combinatorial optimization problems, in particular packing and cutting, graph-based problems and energy planning, along with the design of solution algorithms applied on real-word problems.