Dresden 2011 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 11: Poster Session
SOE 11.5: Poster
Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 18:05–18:45, P2
Graph-theoretic analysis of material flow layouts in packaging industry — Kristian Götze1, •Reik V. Donner1,2, and Thomas Seidel1,3 — 1Institute for Transport and Economics, Dresden University of Technology, Germany — 2Potsdam Institufe for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany — 3AMC Managing Complexity GmbH, Monheim am Rhein, Germany
We present a detailed analysis of the material flow systems of six different factories of a packaging manufacturer from a complex network perspective. For this purpose, the functional factory layout is interpreted as a directed graph, the vertices of which correspond to material handling and processing stations, while edges represent transportation devices such as conveyors, forklifts, or similar objects. The resulting networks are of sufficient size (between 134 and 334 vertices) to allow meaningfully studying graph properties on both local and global scale. Centrality measures such as degree and betweenness reveal vertices that are particularly crucial for the function of the overall system and should therefore be designed in a redundant way in order to avoid high economic risks in case of failures. Regarding the meso-scale network properties, the observed motif distributions are found to differ considerably from those of known superfamilies of networks, which is mainly due to a very low abundance of closed 3-loops. Possible implications of our findings for the design of efficient and robust material flow infrastructures are discussed.