Material Flow Management in Industrial Engineering

The material flow theory (MFT) proposes a general scientific model without taking into account the nature of the described material flow. Even if some of the considerations made are covering the entire MFT area, we are not interested here in the specific aspects of economic or social material flow, but only on the industrial engineering area of applications. In this context, the first main goal of this article is to present a synoptic view of the MFT concepts that could be used in material flow management of the manufacturing architectures. The second goal is to use these theoretical concepts for defining a general algorithm to increase productivity and profit using material flow management, emphasizing on this algorithm the particularities of manufacturing architectures optimization. Although, our approach narrows MFT to industrial engineering applications, in the same time sets the theoretical base for using this theory in the design and optimization of any type of manufacturing systems. Moreover, the concepts described in this article can be used to accommodate new trends in industrial engineering, such as additive manufacturing, hybrid manufacturing, layout optimization, integration of virtual models and process simulations data in the manufacturing systems simulations and so forth.