Optimization-based planning heuristic for material flow congestion avoidance in conveyor network design

A model is developed to plan material flow congestion avoidance on a networ k of conveyors for handling discrete batches of items, e.g. scanned package s. Minimizing maximum material flow congestion is used as a guide to design the conveyor network by evenly distributing the flow of such batches by co nsidering capacities of the conveyors and existing flow. Problems of this t ype are typically NP-hard which makes them unsolvable by standard mixed int eger programming solvers. A method based on results from probability theory is used to solve the formulated problem. Experimental results are presente d co demonstrate convergence within 10-100 iterations.