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Bread: https://pearlbakery.com https://pearlbakery.com We are moving the operation out of downtown Portland OR, but this virus will slow down our opening. The

Bread: https://pearlbakery.com https://pearlbakery.com We are moving the operation out of downtown Portland OR, but this virus will slow down our opening. There’s a surprising number of ways to apply technology to bread baking. Inventory management, formula calculation, delivery planning, etc. There’s also the problem of trying to optimize the production schedule , i.e. when to mix, how long to rise, when to shape, and when to bake, across your entire menu with orders changing day to day.

shoo 7y ago
> There’s a surprising number of ways to apply technology to bread baking. Inventory management, formula calculation, delivery planning, etc. There’s also the problem of trying to optimize the production schedule Yup! For example, here's an old press release from a vendor of combinatorial optimisation software (LocalSolver) -- the type of software that you might use to optimise Operations Research type problems: inventory management, supply chain, planning, routing, scheduling -- about a successful integration and deployment of their product to cost-optimise a large Japanese bakery's supply chain decisions: > [Pasco Shikishima Corporation]'s supply chain involves 15 factories in Japan, each one with several production lines, and more than 100 distribution centers. Pasco's catalog contains more than 1,000 products. 900,000 orders have to be executed each day in Pasco's factories. For each order, Pasco has to decide where and when to produce it. Moreover, Pasco has to decide where to source raw materials and which routes to deliver distribution centers. The goal is to minimize production and distribution costs over several days of horizon, while respecting production and distribution capacities. > Here is the scale of a LocalSolver instance solved by Pasco to plan the next 3 days: 32,670,717 expressions (that is, intermediate variables) including 8,307,431 binary decisions, 991,251 constraints, 16 lexicographic-ordered objectives. This model was solved in 3 minutes of running time on a modern but standard server, including input and output processing times. -- https://www.localsolver.com/news.html?id=70 https://www.localsolver.com/news.html?id=70 (& apologies for dragging the conversation back towards software, but there's some challenging mathematical & computational problems involved in figuring out how to manufacture & distribute physical products efficiently)

shoo 7y ago

> There’s a surprising number of ways to apply technology to bread baking. Inventory management, formula calculation, delivery planning, etc. There’s also the problem of trying to optimize the production schedule Yup! For example, here's an old press release from a vendor of combinatorial optimisation software (LocalSolver) -- the type of software that you might use to optimise Operations Research type problems: inventory management, supply chain, planning, routing, scheduling -- about a successful integration and deployment of their product to cost-optimise a large Japanese bakery's supply chain decisions: > [Pasco Shikishima Corporation]'s supply chain involves 15 factories in Japan, each one with several production lines, and more than 100 distribution centers. Pasco's catalog contains more than 1,000 products. 900,000 orders have to be executed each day in Pasco's factories. For each order, Pasco has to decide where and when to produce it. Moreover, Pasco has to decide where to source raw materials and which routes to deliver distribution centers. The goal is to minimize production and distribution costs over several days of horizon, while respecting production and distribution capacities. > Here is the scale of a LocalSolver instance solved by Pasco to plan the next 3 days: 32,670,717 expressions (that is, intermediate variables) including 8,307,431 binary decisions, 991,251 constraints, 16 lexicographic-ordered objectives. This model was solved in 3 minutes of running time on a modern but standard server, including input and output processing times. -- https://www.localsolver.com/news.html?id=70 https://www.localsolver.com/news.html?id=70 (& apologies for dragging the conversation back towards software, but there's some challenging mathematical & computational problems involved in figuring out how to manufacture & distribute physical products efficiently)