Excellence in Research: Reconfigurable Supply Chain Network Design and Assembly Planning for Factory-in-a-Box Manufacturing

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This Excellence in Research (EiR) award will contribute to the advancement of national prosperity and economic welfare by studying efficient operations of mobile manufacturing facilities. Mobile manufacturing is an emerging paradigm that allows for production modules to be transported by vehicles to demand locations, thus reducing both the cost and time of delivery. This paradigm has been suggested for diverse, specialized applications, including vaccine manufacturing to respond to spatial disease outbreaks and battlefield or ship-board spare parts manufacturing to repair damaged equipment. This project addresses a critical enabling aspect of mobile manufacturing, namely how to effectively configure the supporting supply chain and assembly process. In this new paradigm, suppliers will need to deliver to different manufacturing locations at different times, which may necessitate engaging different suppliers depending on the mobile manufacturing transport sequence. This research will build a decision-making framework for supply chain network design and assembly planning explicitly incorporating the logistics of materials delivery. The PI will employ optimization methods to study two subproblems. The first will consider a Machine Scheduling Problem to schedule raw material delivery to subassemblies at different suppliers. The second will consider a Vehicle Routing Problem for the assignment of trucks for transport of the subassemblies from suppliers to the mobile manufacturer. The PIs will investigate new computational approaches to these difficult optimization problems. A test platform for production of biological therapeutics using microfluidic devices will allow undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to develop a working hardware and software mobile "factory-in-a-box". The project will involve development of educational programs in advanced analytics for engineering systems at the local institution and will provide advanced education and training for minority graduate students as well as summer research for undergraduate students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.