Academic literature on the topic 'Process Optimization'

The theoretical part will be focused on presenting information within the process management. Some of the pieces of this theoretical information will be were slightly modified by internal Continental procedures and applied in the practical part of the thesis in order to redesign current purchasing process of non production material. The contents of the practical part of this thesis are the analysis of the current purchasing process of non-production material in the plant of Continental. The intention is to identify the waste and obstacles in the process. The main target is to improve the process in consideration of efficiency, lead time reduction and, if applicable, cost savings. Once the waste in the process is identified, the 100% value added ideal state is going to be developed, under consideration of implementing the improvements, which have been identified in the current state. Based on the differences between the current state and the ideal state of the process, the future state is going to be mapped.

Increasing interest to optimization of goods incoming process has paralleled the rise of product diversity and advanced warehouse management based on logistics support systems. Nowadays, companies are universally faced with the requirements to reengineer their business processes starting with goods incoming operation, aiming to significantly reduce total operating costs and quickly respond to ultimate consumer. Previous academic research has provided many alternatives to attain the expected results. Nevertheless, an enormous gap still exists between theoretical research and practical operations. The purpose of this paper is to bridge this gap from operation level.We introduced a theoretical framework which was organized around earlier studies, latest findings and established literatures associated with overview of goods incoming process, flows management, seven wastes, logistics support systems etc. Meanwhile, an online fashion retailer, Nelly.com goods incoming process has been mapped from goods receiving, packing and sorting, warehousing to data input. As a result, intermittent material flows and information flows has been realized. Later on, a sensitivity analysis was performed to observe all wastes in the process through precise timing of each detailed activity. As the weaknesses and opportunities have been identified within Nelly’s goods incoming process, some heuristic solutions were proposed in the paper.Generally, flows should be smoothed and accelerated, particularly material flows and information flows related with goods incoming process. The interruption and miscommunication should be avoided to streamline the whole operation. Whilst, we inferred that all wastes within every sub-process have to be aware of. Consequently, some techniques such as scheduled delivery, cross-docking, goods classification, improved logistics support systems were proposed to eliminate wastes. Further on, the prevailed business process reengineering should be conducted as the next step to reallocate some resources or operations.Lastly, we simulated an expected goods incoming process based on Nelly’s status quo and heuristic suggestions. And some future research issues have been presented at the end to extend the vision to relevant domains.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering; in conjunction with the Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT, 2007.<br>Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-70).<br>Novartis is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, with their research headquarters (Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research) located in Cambridge MA. In this thesis, I explore Novartis's process for developing drugs, specifically the earlier stages of research leading to high throughput screening. During the course of a 6.5 month, on-site project, Novartis's processes were identified, data were collected and relevant literature in product development and organizational structure were surveyed. Based on the accumulation of this information, several opportunities for improvement were identified and from these, recommendations were developed and implemented. This thesis considers the improvements Novartis could see in their drug discovery process by improving communication between organizations. In particular, I suggest that the company could benefit in cycle time and quality by designing and following more robust lateral processes and by moving their communication mode closer to integrative problem solving.<br>(cont.) Following these recommendations, I investigated why Novartis did not already have these processes in place. I hypothesize that the main reason for this is because the research organization at Novartis is focused primarily on exploration, therefore their ability and need to coordinate has not been an area of focus. Novartis has made a very deliberate effort to design an organization that promotes novel drug discovery; perhaps sacrificing cycle time and process efficiency. Because of this strong focus on drug discovery, Novartis has not had opportunity to design and implement efficient processes. By bring in interns from MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing Program, the company is beginning to explore ways to improve their processes without sacrificing their ability to develop novel drugs.<br>by Rebecca Anne Roberts.<br>S.M.<br>M.B.A.

Les procédés de séparation membranaire sont une technologie bien connue et déjà largement utilisée dans le domaine de la purification des gaz. Ces procédés sont applicables à de nombreux secteurs d’activités industriels. Selon les performances de séparation recherchées, elles peuvent constituer une alternative intéressante aux technologies existantes de traitement des gaz (adsorption, cryogénie, contacteurs gaz/liquide). Pour exploiter au mieux cette technologie, le développement d'outils d’aide à la décision permettant d’identifier les procédés et les conditions opératoires économiquement avantageux est absolument nécessaire. Bien que les approches expérimentales d'optimisation appliquées à différentes études de cas conservent un intérêt certain, une approche générale et sa validation dans le cadre de différentes études de cas font toujours défaut. L’objectif principal de cette thèse est de développer un outil numérique le plus générique possible d’optimisation de procédés de séparation membranaire. Dans ce travail, la synthèse du procédé membranaire est traitée et modélisée comme un problème d'optimisation mathématique non linéaire et non convexe basé sur un paradigme de superstructure couvrant une combinatoire d'unités (modules membranaires, compresseurs, pompes à vide) et de connexions la plus exhaustive possible. Des fonctions de coûts réalistes et détaillées sont utilisées comme fonction objectif dans l'optimisation. Une stratégie d'optimisation globale continue, qui peut se considérer comme la composition de deux algorithmes : Multistart et Monotonic Basin Hopping (MBH) ; est présentée pour résoudre le problème d'optimisation susmentionné. L'efficacité de cette démarche d'optimisation est dans un premier temps validée en comparant sa solution à celles présentées dans la littérature. La méthode proposée est ensuite appliquée à l'optimisation de plusieurs cas emblématiques de la séparation de gaz (CO2 de gaz de haut fourneaux, séparation O2/N2 de l’air, traitement du biogaz et du gaz naturel). Différents degrés de liberté du système sont permis et analysés selon les cas (pressions variables, type de membrane variable). L'analyse détaillée des résultats est discutée en termes d’architecture de procédés et de distribution des coûts (CAPEX, OPEX)<br>Membrane separation is a well-known technology in gas purification, which is applicable in different aspects of the industry. Over the last decades, depending on the required separation performances, it became a viable alternative to several gas separation technologies (adsorption, cryogenics, gas /liquid contactors). To exploit at best this technology, nevertheless, tools to find cost-effective designs and operating conditions are necessary. While experimental optimization approaches applied to different case studies have been investigated extensively, a more generic optimization approach and its validation along different case studies are still missing. The work of this thesis starts with this key observation and tries to fill this gap. The membrane process synthesis is modelled as a nonlinear and non-convex mathematical optimization problem based on a superstructure paradigm covering a wide range of possible units (membrane modules, compressors, and vacuum pumps) and connections as exhaustive as possible. Realistic and detailed cost functions are used as the objective in the optimization. A continues global optimization strategy, that can be considered as the composition of two algorithms: Multistart and Monotonic Basin Hopping (MBH); is presented to solve the aforementioned optimization problem. The efficiency of this overall optimization approach is, first, validated by comparing its solution with the ones presented in the literature. Then, the proposed method is applied to the optimization of several important gas separation cases (CO2 recovery from blast furnace gas, O2/N2 air separation, and biogas and natural gas purification) by increasing the membrane system degree of freedom step by step. Detailed analysis of the results is discussed in terms of process architecture and cost distribution (CAPEX, OPEX)

Blast furnace is the heart of every steel plant. Steel production is based on the blast furnace process, as it is where the iron is extracted from the iron ore and turned into liquid iron, which will subsequently be used to make liquid steel. Therefore, without hot iron, steel can not be produced. Blast furnaces in this process are supplied among others with pulverized coal. Raw coal should be prepared for the blast furnaces in the form of fine coal powder. This fine coal powder should then be injected into the blast furnaces in order to continue the production. This process is carried out by the Pulverized Coal Injection System, which changes raw coal into dry fine coal powder. The system consists of a hot gas generator, a coal mill, a bagfilter as well as various valves, fans and piping. The general idea is to burn specific gases with the help of equipments and to use them to dry the coal in the cycle. When the amount of the gases inserted into the system is changed, the dried coal amount is directly affected. Based on this background the following project is carried out, which aims at the investigation of bottlenecks and critical points in the process. The most important bottleneck is the limited possibility of fresh air usage, as the oxygen in fresh air can cause explosions if existent in exceeding amounts in the system and thus, is dangerous. In order to prevent this explosive condition in the system, additional gases need to be added to the system. The aim of this project is to introduce additional gases to the system in order to increase the upper limit of the fresh air amount. Increasing the amount of fresh air in the recirculation gas should provide more amount of dried coal,hence increasing the drying capacity of the coal grinding plant. To understand the situation better, tests about gas injection are carried out in the system. The results of the tests are analyzed and the performance changes in the system are calculated. For this, programs in Excel and also inLabVIEW are created to interpret the situations easily. As it is understood from the results of the tests, when the amount of the additional gases isincreased, approximately 10% increase in the amount of dried coal is observed. Subsequently, Pulverized Coal Injection mill productivity isincreased. Additionally, oxygen percentage in the mill circuit will decrease and this is important for the safety conditions. To conclude, this project aims to show the usage and recycling of additional gases in “PulverizedCoal Injection” process by implying various programs and interpretations.

Gas nitriding is an important thermochemical surface treatment that is used to improve the wear and corrosion resistance as well as the fatigue endurance of steel parts. Accurate process control is the effective way to ensure the properties reliability of nitriding process. To realize the accurate process control, the nitriding process parameters need to be modeled and controlled to meet the specifications. There has been ongoing effort on the simulation of the gas nitriding process since 1990s. However, most of the work has been done to simulate the gas nitriding process of pure iron due to the limited thermodynamics and kinetics information available on the gas nitriding process of steels. The objective of this project is to develop an accurate and user friendly software model to simulate the gas nitriding process of steels based on the fundamental understanding of thermodynamics and kinetics. In this work, the customized Lehrer diagram which describes the phase stabilities in specified steel as a function of nitriding potential and temperature has been successfully constructed by computational thermodynamics for the first time. Based on the Lehrer diagrams for steels, the compound layer growth model is proposed to simulate the gas nitriding process of steels. By using this model, the properties of the nitrided steels based on the phase constitution, surface nitrogen concentration, nitrogen concentration profile, case depth, as well as growth kinetics can be simulated as a function of the process parameters (temperature, time, and the nitriding atmosphere). The results of the model are in excellent agreement with experimental results.

An experimental study was carried out concerning the optimization of catalyst type, operating conditions, addition of water and hydrogen for use in the THAI-CAPRI process and is reported. Three feeds namely, THAI field oil, Combustion Cell Oil (CCO) and n-decane were used in the presence of catalyst or an inert medium for comparison. Experiments were carried out using micro-reactors containing 5 g catalyst under different temperatures, pressures and gas environments. It was found that there was a trade-off in operation temperature between upgrading performance and catalyst lifetime. At higher temperatures of 500 °C led to an average of 6.1 °API upgrading , however, the catalyst lifetime was limited to 1.5 hours. Operation at 420 °C was found to be a suitable compromise, with upgrading limited up to 3 °API, with catalyst lifetime extended to 77.5 hours. From the results of the current study it can be said that by careful control of the temperature and oil flow rate in the in-situ CAPRI process, additional upgrading compared with the THAI process alone may be effected, resulting in a more valuable produced oil, which is easier to transport and could be further processed into distillates.

The work of the Thesis has been pursued in collaboration with an important company operating in the tourist sector. The followed projects in the work can be seen as belonging to the Destination Management branch, that is the study and the implementation of actions aimed at better managing the company offer related to touristic experiences broadly. In particular, the first project has been related to Revenue Forecasting and has dealt with the definition of a methodology, based on mathematical and statistical techniques, aimed at forecasting the revenue streams linked to specific items of a company; the second project, Destination Discovery, instead aimed at the high-level analysis of tourism opportunities in different geographical areas, researching and evaluating new possibilities for the company related to tourist interest. In the work, some preliminaries about what a forecast is will be provided and the many techniques aimed at accomplishing the task, giving a general theoretical framework for the topic will be discussed. Then some details about data and the set of more practical operations needed in order to extract information from them in a numerical manner, eventually building a forecasting model on it will be discussed. Later the application of the techniques previously introduced to the different projects will be discussed; for each one of them, the methodologies followed and the analyzes carried out will be provided, as well as the obtained results. Finally an analysis of what has globally been done in the work along with different comments, the obtained results and some possible future work and improvements will conclude the work.

High quality scrap is the dream of all the smelters but it is expensive. Therefore low quality scrap has also to be re-melted. Here two strategies have to be taken into account: increasing the scrap quality inside the refinery and removing the non-metal content during the re-melting of the scrap The aim of this doctoral thesis is to support the aluminium recycling industry in both these aspects highlighting the influence of the pre-melting scrap treatments and the melting practices on the effectiveness of the recycling process in terms of metal recovery.<br>I rottami di alta qualità sono i più facile da riciclare, ma anche i più costosi. Due vie sono percorribili per rendere possibile il riciclo di rottami con un alto livello di elementi non desiderati: aumentarne la qualità attraverso appositi trattamenti pre-fusione e rimuovere il contenuto non metallico durante la rifusione Scopo di questa tesi di dottorato è quello di sostenere l'industria del riciclaggio dell'alluminio in entrambi questi aspetti, evidenziando l'influenza dei trattamenti pre-fusione del rottame e delle pratiche di fusione sull'efficacia del processo di riciclaggio in termini di resa metallica del processo stesso.

Master thesis focuses on payment process automatization of selected company XY, which will eliminate repetitive manual work and routine and will lead to shortening of the whole process. To reach this solution RPA – Robotic Process Automation was used. RPA was designed based on data analysis, which showed areas of process best suited for automatization. Part of the thesis is also evaluation of impacts of implemented RPA solution.