FAGOR electrical appliances

'FAGOR electrodomésticos' is one of the main components in Mondragon Corporation (www.mcc.es). The Spanish white goods multinational is divided in eight business divisions: 

  • refrigeration,
  • washing and drying machines, 
  • cooking, 
  • dishwashers, 
  • heating, 
  • small electrial appliances, advanced home systems and kitchen furniture.

​It has a powerful commercial network covering 130 different countries in all 5 continents. 

The E@SY project studied the assembly line 2 of the cooking division. 

Their feeding system has been designed for respecting the supplying constraints induced by the assembly lines. Each one consists of a set of work stations arranged along a conveyor belt or a similar mechanical handling equipment. The jobs are consecutively launched down the line and moved from work station to work station, at a given production rate. Assembly system performance is influenced by the design characteristics of the product and production processes, as well as by the efficiency of the supplying system that feeds the work stations. 

In the FAGOR’s feeding system, both storage and transport activities are energy-costing. For the transportation part, the energy cost is clearly related to the total traveled distance and the power source used. Determining the relation between inventory management and energy consumption is less obvious since there are many aspects that can impact the evaluation:

  • the material packing,
  • the inventory maintenance,
  • the stock feeding plan,
  • the stock dimensions, ...

A major goal of the EASY project is to understand how these factors interact with each other’s, then to provide mathematical models that capture, at various abstraction level, the interactions and their relation with energy consumption. 

Energy sourcing and transportation alternatives are considered during the modeling aiming to promote and evaluate management solutions that mix energy and transportation modes. Indeed such strategies can possibly be more environmentally friendly than others. Moreover, the case where energy prices are time dependent since many companies face this problem is also considered. Another interest area of the E@SY project is to study the robustness of management strategies, with regard to energy consumption, when facing uncertainties such as demand fluctuation or transportation lateness.