Sustainable production – combining Lean, agile and green philosophies

Material flow is a significant factor in the design of manufacturing plants. Failure to fully integrate proper production logistics solutions including handling devices results in huge waste of production time, space, resources and energy.

In a manufacturing plant, these important factors can be related to the concepts of:
- Lean (resources and space)
- Green (energy and life cycle)
- Agile (time)

In his PhD thesis, Maziar Mashaei develops a sustainable design framework combining methods and models to realize automated material handling systems that fulfill the criteria of the mentioned philosophies.

"This results presented in this thesis are clearly addressing the issues in today's production environment.  We aim to apply the framework and models in the design of systems and controls from FlexLink.  I know this will give unique opportunities to our customers as the optimizing of their production logistics solutions will be based on their real need and with a minimum of resources, already at the design stage." concludes Fredrik Boberg, R&D manager at FlexLink.