Industrial Process Prototyping A hands-on simulation tool that can offer a more accessible way to interface information, specifically how to staff operations and organize operations within a mail processing plant.
Who:
From the USPS: Ken Paul, Media Lab liaison From the Media Lab: Bakhtiar
Mikhak, head of the Grassroots Invention research group and
his student, Tim Gorton
When:
2001-02
Where:
MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Why:
The USPS has a very complex mailflow with six different products
that each have different service requirements. In addition, mail
comes in three different shapes—letters, flats, and packages—each
with different handling characteristics. Finally, each piece of
mail must go to a specific address.
The USPS wanted to streamline its mailflow operations, but their
simulation model was difficult to use and required a week of training
because it was not intuitive to understand.
How:
The USPS saw an opportunity to use tools at the Lab to analyze mailflow in one of their plants.
Details
Bakhtiar Mikhak, head of the Grassroots Invention
research group, and his student, Tim Gorton, were working on a simulation
model built using the "Cricket" system of programmable bricks and bus
devices. This system offers physical and computational representations.
They built a prototype of the system for the USPS to try out.
The USPS chose to analyze the flow of one particular
kind of mail—preprinted, barcoded mail—because it has a relatively
simple mail flow, requiring the use of a couple kinds of equipment with
different processing capabilities.
Each Cricket in the system represented one piece
of equipment used in the mailflow. Besides providing a new visualization
of the mailflow, they could be rearranged manually to find the most
efficient way to direct mail through the system. The Crickets were connected
by a laptop that could test the system by sending pieces of mail through
the Crickets while the users watched. This gave the users an intuitive
sense of the mailflow and the general results.
This system offers an interactive model for a
group of managers to manipulate the performance of the machines and
redesign mailflow.
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