Improving decision making in product flow-based tiling automation for custom mosaic design

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a new tile dispensing decision-making to improve a row formation of a product flow-based tiling automation that has been being developed to support tile placement for custom mosaic design. Design/methodology/approach A new tile dispensing decision-making combines maximum tile loading and simple cycle strategies to minimize time for forming rows of tiles. The maximum tile loading strategy is for minimizing the number of loading rounds, while the simple cycle strategy is for minimizing the movement during the row formation. Findings This proposed decision-making has been developed; implemented in LabVIEW software; linked with other LabVIEW-based programs to control the system; and tested. The results showed the tile dispensing with the proposed decision-making performed better than the previous one. Research limitations/implications The tiling automation is being developed and is currently on a prototyping stage. Originality/value Tile dispensing is critical for this row by row automated assembly, but the existing shortest distance strategy does not guarantee the best performance for a row formation. Therefore, the combination of the maximum tile loading and simple cycle strategies has been developed to improve the performance of the product flow-based tiling automation to better support assembly of custom mosaic design that requires individual tesserae to be assembled to particular positions to illustrate an image properly.