By José Ángel de la Paz

An article by Federico Trigos, research professor at EGADE Business School and expert in Business Analytics, was included in a special edition of the International Journal of Production Research (IJPR), a high-impact scientific publication (Q1).

The paper “About tooling capacity for the vulcanising planning decision problem to improve strategic business profit” was written in collaboration with Eduardo López, consulting director at NCA Europa.

The article, Trigos explained, contributes to optimizing both the quotation and production planning of an essential component of every internal combustion system, the rubber curved hose, used in all aerospace, marine and land liquid fuel engines. 

“We began our research after asking ourselves how we could optimize quotations for new platforms, including tooling, and the production of this type of manufacturing cells.”

“We couldn’t find any articles in the scientific literature that address this problem, and developed an algorithm to solve it,” explained the member of the National System of Researchers and the Mexican Academy of Science.

This research was first presented in October 2017 in the seventh edition of the International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Systems Management (IESM) 2017, held in Saarbrucken, Germany.

Afterwards, the work by Trigos and López was selected to form part of an IJPR special edition with the most outstanding papers from this academic event, which brought together researchers from all over the world to discuss Industry 4.0 trends and challenges.

After receiving this distinction, the authors developed an extended version of their investigation, which was published in September this year.

As background information, Trigos and López published the paper “A vulcanising decision planning as a particular one-dimensional cutting stock problem with limited part-related tooling in make-to-order industrial environments”, in 2016.

Find out more about their latest work here.