What is Work Points

The first part of the article presents fundamentals of the Material Flow Theory (MFT) centered on five major topics: material flow and generic associate architecture definitions and classifications; major characteristics of discrete, continuous and hybrid material flow; mathematical and virtual modeling of material flow; material flow simulating algorithms (including a general algorithm for optimizing the associated architecture determining the flow trajectory), as well as major MFT applications in different fields. In the second part, the article focuses on the specific applications of MFT in industrial engineering material flow management (MFM). The accent is put on exploring different possibilities to increase productivity and profit in manufacturing architectures using the MFM approach based on virtual modeling and simulation. The proposed main topics of this section are: definition and characteristics of diffused and concentrated manufacturing architectures, virtual modeling of the manufacturing architecture structural elements, MFM simulation algorithms, diagnosis and optimization for manufacturing architectures in industrial engineering using MFM.