In this paper, we considered flower replenishment operation as a special type of vehicle routing problem, which can be described as the problem of designing least cost routes and required trucks. Hence, we formulated the flower replenishment operation in 2010 Taipei Flora Expo as the flower replenishment problem in this study.
We proposed a two-stage algorithm, the KG algorithm, combining the K-means algorithm with the genetic algorithm to provide feasible and near-optimal solutions for the Expo’s daily operations. Base on the experiment results, the KG algorithm showed significant cost reduction and traveling time saving while compared with traditional methods. The optimal operation could keep flora products fresh with shorter traveling time. Moreover, the authority has more time to replace withered flowers by fresh products and deals with other daily operations. Therefore, the Expo’s quality will be improved in order to provide excellent exhibitions.
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TRANSITION
After we did a research on flower replenishment operation for the Taipei Flora Exposition, we apply the heuristic method into practical. We consider this case is a VRPTW Problem and we applied some algorithm to figure out the best solution to save the truck traveling time to supply flowers to Taipei Flora Exposition. Also, we did have a significant cost reduction while comparing with the traditional method.
Our first part for Taipei Flora Exposition Case has concluded many improvement of your research and the performance of our application in this case. After that, we will move on the next part for the Design of Cloud Inventory Management System Based on RFID Technology - A Case Study on Taipei Flora Exposition. In this case, we know that in Taipei Flora Exposition, we need a lot of employees to take care of different kinds of flower every day and replace the new one according to its life cycle.
However, in this huge Exposition, we speech too much money on taking stock and replace the flowers every day. Respecting this issue, we are going to design an inventory management system based on RFID Technology to apply in this case to minimize the labor cost and traveling cost for replacing the flowers. Besides, we will combine the cloud computing technique with our inventory system to run the whole flower supply chain for Taipei Flora Exposition. The Part 2 will be our second part of our research for this case.
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CHAPTER2 Design of Cloud Inventory Management System Based on RFID Technology
2.1 Introduction
In today's society, science and technology in rapid development, abundant products, improving quality and using advanced technology are more and more diverse. As an important part of the supply chain management, inventory control has direct impact on the overall effectiveness of the supply chain, such as maintaining production process continuity, cost-sharing orders, in a timely manner to meet customer needs. Inventory faces issues, such as overstock, shortage and cost of risk.
How to prevent inventory risk and setup the inventory in a reasonable level is a problem to every business. Appling technologies in supply chain management play a key role in the prevention of inventory risk. Advanced information technology can optimize and reorganize of the various nodes on the supply chain, achieve sharing information on all nodes of the supply chain, understand customer needs in real-time, reduce inventory levels, and improve purchasing and delivery accuracy, reducing the inevitable information distortion in the supply chain, improve the supply chain imbalance as the result of information asymmetry, provide enterprises with real-time information, thereby reduce the bullwhip effect on the supply chain. Moreover, in a rapid development of technology, the initial of stage of cloud computing is also a good choice to implement in inventory management system.
Cloud Computing is one kind of emerging business accounting model. It calculates the duty to distribute on the resource pool with massive computers constitute, enabling each kind of application system according to the need to gain the computation strength, the storage space and all kinds of software services. This kind of resource pool is called “the cloud.” “The cloud” is virtual computation resources that can maintain and manage itself, usually for some large-scale server cluster, including calculating server, storage server and so on. The Cloud computing will integrate all computation resources, and can be managed automatically through the software without intervene. This is favorable to innovation and reduces cost and also can be integrated in our inventory management system.
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RFID is considered as the main technology for realizing the ubiquitous environment by providing the identity to the physical object. The RFID tag, which is consisted of an antenna, transceiver, and integrated circuit with memory, has been widely used for supply chain and inventory management to increase the business efficiency. Also, it can be used for ID badges, access control, fleet maintenance, equipment and parts maintenance, parking log access control, toll gate system, car tracking, manufacturing line control, etc. The tag is attached or integrated to an object, such as a product that can be read by RFID reader and then identify the object with the information in the tag. In general, RFID tags tend to be mobile and readers are stationary. This is the typical architecture for the well known RFID application such as supply chain management. However, we can easily think the RFID applications that both of RFID tags and readers to be mobile. This kind of RFID reader is referred to as portable RFID reader or mobile RFID reader. In this case, the handheld of the mobile RFID reader can read the tag and get the information of the tagged object at any time and in any place. This is provided by the fact that the mobile RFID reader can easily connect the RFID to server in any place via wireless communication network.
Implementing information technology to accelerate and smooth the physical flow of goods through a supply chain is significantly more valuable than using information technology to expand the flow of information [1]. Traditional inventory management method can’t meet the requirement because the events of the each link based on the supply chain of products are synchronized under the environment of supply chain management [2]. The effective inventory management is crucial in terms of reducing operational costs. The newly emerged narrowcasting technology enables the integration of promotion and inventory management activities in a real time manner [3]. In addition, Liu [4] analysis the effect of RFID technology in reducing inventory levels, mastery real-time inventory information, improve inventory management capabilities, and presents information feedback security protocols.
Cloud computing can connect millions of computers to super cloud and the application field the merit of cloud computing, such as, it do not need user’s high level equipment to reduce the user’s cost. It provides secure and dependable data storage center, so user do not need to do redundant things of storing data and killing virus. This kind of task can be done by professionals [5]. In addition, cloud computing
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has taken commercial computing by storm. Cloud computing platforms provide easy access to a company’s high-performance computing and storage infrastructure through web services. With cloud computing, the aim is to hide the complexity of IT infrastructure management from its users. At the same time, cloud computing platforms provide massive scalability, 99.999% reliability, high performance, and specifiable configurability [6]. Besides, Cloud computing can be viewed from two different aspects. One is about the cloud infrastructure which is the building block for the up layer cloud application. The other is of course the cloud applications. By means of three technical methods, cloud computing has achieved two important goals for the distributed computing: high scalability and high availability [7].
Nowadays, the cost of introducing RFID technology in an application is not generally a barrier and RFID can be implement to manage and control the rotation of returnable transport item [8]. In this study, we have conducted great effort on inventory management. Inventory management based on RFID can be tracked more accurately in real time, resulting in reduced processing time and labor. The complete visibility of accurate inventory data throughout the intelligent management system from tags to portable reader brings opportunities for transformation and improvement in mass inventory stocking [9]. In addition, in our case, we may consider about the life cycle of product. Researchers have developed various models for production planning and control, the collection of end-of-life products from the suppliers to customers [10]. The benefits of RFID have been discussed in many articles.
According to the article by Lapide [11], RFID benefits manufacturing suppliers with operational efficiencies and integrated supply chains. Many examples show supply chain benefits being realized with RFID including elimination of human errors, errors in product processing, improve operator efficiency, reduce out-of stock rate, and eliminate the need for human operators to key in ID codes [12]. Companies can expect to benefit from RFID in a number of ways such as flexibility, responsiveness, enhanced service, control, and improved security [13].
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