The packaging line of the Future

Packaging Design & Management

Background

There is hardly any detailed knowledge available on how to manage the design process of a packaging line. A packaging line is a sequence of a lot of different machinery with a multitude of parameters. Within the machinery there are buffers. Normally so-called V-curves are being used to set the speed over the line. The design of the packaging has a very strong correlation with the performance of packaging line, but this is unknown or neglected in practice. These design processes can be optimised in many ways.

Goals

This research field aims to develop tools like software programmes to get a grip on this design process and incorporate the mutually dependent factors of both packaging and packaging lines. The results can be diverse like higher Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), insights into design rules to optimise the relation between packaging design and efficiency, higher flexibility, standardisation,etc.

Perspectives

A thesis showed that with the use of software packaging lines could be optimised. Nevertheless the project also generated many questions like the influence of the many stops during the packaging process and the fact that the bottleneck was another machine, according to the engineering of the line. Insights in the relation between packaging design and efficiency start to grow. Aspects that are not taken up in the specification like friction, stiffness, temperature, can influence the efficiency and should be part of the line engineering and packaging design process.