Show all necessary work and include all computer files you use. Demand for forkl
ID: 3251635 • Letter: S
Question
Show all necessary work and include all computer files you use.
Demand for forklift moves follows an exponential distribution at rate of ten per hour. The time it takes a forklift to complete a service follows an Erlang-4 distribution with a mean of eight minutes. The hourly cost of operating a forklift is $100/hr. The average cost of delay (whether waiting for the forklift or while the load is being moved) for uncompleted move request is $120/hour. How many forklifts should there be to minimize total expected hourly cost? You can use QTS to find the MOPs for this problem, but summarize the details here.
Explanation / Answer
Herbaceous biomass can contribute to the renewable energy supply for electricity, process steam, liquid fuel, and commodity chemicals. Efficient systems to harvest and store round bales of perennial grass in storage locations within 5 km of the production fields are available. The major limitations are loading these bales at the storage locations and hauling to meet a weekly demand schedule at a processing plant operating continuously for 50 weeks yr1. Analysis is presented for a 27 Mg h1 plant.
The concept is to pack 32, 1.5-m round bales into a container with the same dimensions as a 12.2-m (40-ft) ISO shipping container. These containers are loaded at a satellite storage location, hauled to a receiving facility at the processing plant, and unloaded. The analysis examines two options. Option 1 uses a forklift to place a loaded container onto a standard transport chassis at the satellite storage location. A similar forklift unloads the containers at the receiving facility. Option 2 uses a Swinglift trailer that loads and unloads the containers onto the trailer using on-board hydraulics.
The cost for Option 1 was calculated at $7.80 dry Mg1, as compared with $8.37 dry Mg1calculated for Option 2. The cost for Option 1 is lower even though the forklift used at the satellite storage location in Option 1 is only operated at 27% of daily capacity, thus operating cost per dry Mg to load is higher than it would be if scheduling could be done such that more containers could be loaded each workday. The forklift spends most of the time waiting for the container to be packed with bales. The limiting factor established in this analysis is the feasibility of packing 32 bales into a container within an allowed 30 min.