Heuristic methods for selection and ordering of part-orienting devices

Part-orienting systems are employed in many manufacturing environments to feed work parts in correct orientation for proper operations. A part-orienting system is a serial arrangement of orienting devices; the selection and ordering of these devices is an important design aspect that is addressed in this paper. In addition, a parallel configuration that consists of individual orienting subsystems is briefly investigated. Numerical examples and extensive computational results are reported.