Mitigating Workflow Congestion
This groundbreaking study of a perennial problem—workflow congestion—examines how travel time, rather than distance, is the key to routing and layout design in facilities. UB Researchers have found that using alternate routing, along less congested paths, can significantly lower the total material handling time.
When flow intensity is “medium,” the benefits of alternate routing are most pronounced. For less or highly congested facilities, the traditional shortest path is usually adequate. Such factors as blocking time, average waiting time at an intersection, interruptions caused by pedestrians, vehicles, or pick-ups and drop-offs, as well as actual travel time versus shortest travel time are factored into an analysis of this problem.
This study proposes the use of a novel Full Assignment Problem with Congestion (FAPC) as an alternate to the traditional Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) for facility layout. A combination of FAPC and alternate routing turns out to be more effective than the singular change of rerouting or re-layout.
By modeling an appropriate facility, researchers can run a number of simulations to determine what kind of design and routing approaches will yield the least amount of congestion and the most optimal flow conditions.
