Aanvoer en opslag van dunne melk in een melkproduktenfabriek

Summary In a dairy products plant the problem arose that the milk‐carrying tankcars had considerable waiting times at the receiving platform. This was supposedly caused by too small a capacity of the raw milk storage room. In order to study this problem the stream of milk through the storage room was followed for three weeks continuously. The storage room proved to operate mainly as a daily buffer. This function could be expressed in a linear equation. Its discussion led to some simple measures resulting in a considerable increase in efficiency of the storage room. The study further proved that the waiting times of the tankcars were caused to only a small extent by the storage room capacity and that this effect could be eliminated by the above mentioned measures. It was concluded, therefore, that the storage room need not be enlarged. The principal cause of the waiting times proved to be the limited unloading capacity of the receiving platform. And this in its turn was due to a strong periodicity in arrival frequencies of the cars. So, the solution of the problem had to be found in better car schedules, capable of breaking the periodicity. Apart from this periodicity the capacity of the existing receiving platform was ample, as was shown by means of queuing theory. Further, a special application of queuing theory was used to calculate the optimal design of a receiving platform. It was shown that few high capacity receiving installations are preferable to a larger number of smaller installations. The practical optimum is a platform of three installations.