Control concept for autonomous changeable material flow systems

Today’s material flow systems for mass customization or dynamic productions are usually realized with manual transportation systems. However new concepts in the domain of material flow and device control like function-oriented modularization and intelligent multi-agent-systems offer the possibility to employ changeable and automated material flow systems in dynamic production structures. These systems need the ability to react on unplanned and unexpected events autonomously.

A Cooperative and Adaptive Variable Neighborhood Search for the Multi Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

In this paper we propose two cooperation schemes to compose new parallel variants of the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS). On the one hand, a coarse-grained cooperation scheme is introduced which is well suited for being enhanced with a solution warehouse to store and manage the so far best found solutions and a self-adapting mechanism for the most important search parameters. This makes an a priori parameter tuning obsolete. On the other hand, a fine-grained scheme was designed to reproduce the successful properties of the sequential VNS. In combination with the use of parallel exploration threads all of the best solutions and 11 out of 20 new best solutions for the Multi Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows were found.

Energy and weight reduction in hoisting systems with magnetic traction sheaves

At the Chair of Logistics Engineering, TU Dresden, a particular focus is research and development of magnetic traction sheaves. Therein the main fundamentals of these special sheaves are determined for applications in different fields such as elevators, several kinds of winches, hoists and cranes. In the current research project “energy balance of magnetic traction sheaves”, the dynamic behaviour of systems with magnetic traction sheaves was investigated. The research focused on theoretical and practical examinations of energy balance. Moreover, a new approach for dimensioning magnetic traction sheave systems is presented. It is a project of the Research Foundation Intralogistics / Material Handling and Logistics (IFL), which is funded through the AiF under the program of Industrial Collective Research for SMEs (IGF) by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi).

The Position of xMOOCs in Educational Systems

The idea of xMOOCs initially aimed at fundamentally changing the US tertiary education system by providing open mass education. This attempt failed for a number of reasons. They include: the ignorance of the importance and benefits of face-to-face instruction, the high workload imposed on students by xMOOCs, the consequences of current xMOOC didactics, the financing of the high costs, and the difficulties of integration into the teaching organization. As a consequence, xMOOCs are turning into methods for professional continuing education including a business model that covers the institution’s cost.