Having a crack at bottle scuffing using agent-based mobility

Abstract Recent advances in large-scale mobility models have shown that much system-level insight can be gained when modelling at the disaggregate, individual level. Although the focus is often on the movement of vehicles and/or individual people, agent-based simulation modelling is used in this paper to model the mobility of bottles on a conveyor line. More specifically, the model focuses on bottle-to-bottle, and bottle-to-barrier collisions on a conveyor belt and examine the bottle movement trajectories. This paper presents the initial results of modelling the collisions as a function of the relative movement of conveyor tracks and barrier angle and suggests the number and duration of collisions could be used to model bottle scuffing. This is valuable as scuffing is the cause of a number of unwanted effects, including visual degradation of the product, and bottle breakage in both the washing and post-filling pasteurisation processes.