Can hundreds of research teams working together rewrite the way we manufacture?
There’s a classic brainteaser that goes like this: A traveling salesman has to visit five cities in one trip. He can visit them in any order he prefers, using any route he likes. What is his quickest path? It turns out that the only surefire way to solve this problem is by brute force–you have to look at each possible path and tote up the distance. For a five-city trip, there are only a dozen possible paths. But add another ten cities, and the permutations quickly climb into the millions. For Rockwell Collins, the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) avionics subsidiary of Rockwell International Corp., this puzzle becomes a monstrous practical problem. Every day, the company shuffles thousands of different-size parts and products among dozens of research, production, and storage centers using a variety of vehicles and routes. Trying to figure out the best path for each part was a logistics nightmare. ”We had a long list of research and development projects” to try to solve it, says Jack R. Harris, d
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- Can hundreds of research teams working together rewrite the way we manufacture?
