Automated Laundry Processing System ALPS Dr. Mark Austin ENPM 645 December 12, 2006 Sulaimin Barrett Liyan Gu Henry Yi2 Outline I. Scope of Work…………………………………………3 II. Project Objective/Major Goals of ALPS………………3 III. System Overview.………………………...……………4 IV. Goals, Scenarios, Use Case..…………..……………….7 V. System Structure and Design……..……………………20 VI. Requirements……………………..……………………21 VII. Verification and Validation....…………………………23 VIII. Tradeoff Analysis……...………………………………29 IX. Conclusion.……….………………………….……...…33 References……………………………………………..343 I. Scope of Work Today's mom and pop dry cleaning business rely heavily on manual labor, especially the manual tagging, cataloging and searching of hundreds of customers' clothing. In a nutshell, a typical cleaner's business process consists of tagging the clothes, cleaning the clothes, cataloging and grouping the clean clothes based on the tags assigned to the clothes and to the customer, and searching for customer's clothes. Every step of the process involves manual cataloging and tracking of customers' clothes. These manual processes work well but are prone to errors and are taxing to dry cleaning staff. Computers have been introduced to the dry cleaning business to reduce errors, but there still exists a heavy reliance on manual labor in the cataloging and searching of clothes. As any manual process, human errors still exist in the process even with use of computers. To show a case of dry cleaning mishaps, an article was taken from Smart Money magazine entitled Ten Things Your Dry Cleaner Won't Tell You. In this article, Daisy Chan talks about common consumer complaints against the dry cleaning business and how they handle these complaints. But placing emphasis on one of the topics in the article about clothing loss, Chan explains how a customer sent in three tablecloths worth $800 to be cleaned and were lost and never located by the dry cleaner. In her article Chan states “According to the Council of Better Business Bureaus, lost items are one of the top three complaints consumers log against dry cleaners. Dry cleaners have a knack for losing your stuff.” There are many causes that may attribute to dry cleaners to lose items, with human error being one of them. In our effort we intend to address part of this issue by focusing on tagging and inventorying of clothes. II. Project Objectives/Major Goals of ALPS The major goals and objectives of ALPS include the following: • Eliminate manual cataloging of clothes • Eliminate manual searching for customer’s clothes • Eliminate such error as misplaced/miscataloged clothes • Reporting of any missing or late clothes • Must be safe for end users • Have manual backup if the system fails4 III. System Overview The overview of Automated Laundry Processing System (ALPS) consists of the same process of picking up, dropping off and cleaning clothes without the use of paper receipts. The normal process of picking up and dropping off clothes remains the same but once the customer leaves ALPS takes over to automate the logging process. As the customer drops off his or her clothes, instead of a paper ticket given out the clothes are scanned and input into the system matching the customer’s personal information. The customer is assigned a unique ID given by ALPS for pick up of clothes. ALPS use Smart Tags and a sophisticated ID system to track clothes from laundering to pick up. It uses these Smart Tags to allow hands free control of the clothes conveyor allowing quick and easy clothes pick up by the customer. ALPS begin with the tagging of the clothes and ends when the clothes are requested for pick up by the customer. By focusing in on this target region we are attempting to eliminate some of the manual labor that can introduce delay in customer pick up, misplacing of clothing items and improper inventorying. ALPS assume that all clothing received have an embedded RF chip in the material. ALPS do not install or supply RF chips or IDs for clothes identification. Current technology has already incorporated the use of RF IDs for merchandise tracking which includes clothes.56 Operator/User Characteristics Typical operators or users of the system are expected to have at least a rudimentary education consisting of at least middle school education. The operators are required to read and understand written English language as well as be proficient in the usage of modern personal computers and its operations. Definitions of terms related to our project and dry cleaning are as follows: • Laundry Transaction: atomic action that starts with customer dropping off articles of clothes to be cleaned and ends with customer picking up the cleaned clothes. • Transaction id/Parent id: an identifier associated with Laundry Transaction • Child id: an identifier attached to each article of clothes in a laundry transaction • Tagging: an act of attaching a unique child id to an article of clothing • Tag: marker that can be identified with scanner • Abnormal child id: all ids that does not belong to the laundry transaction id The overall ALPS system consists of: Scanner Com: communication module interfaces System Controller. All Scanners are attached to Scanner Com. Counter Scanners: scanners that operators at the laundry counter uses to scan incoming and outgoing laundry Conveyor Scanners: scanners that scan the laundry that is in the laundry conveyor Tagging Scanners: scanners that operators at eh tagging counter/station tags received laundry Smart Tags: tags that can be scanned remotely by Counter, Conveyor and Tagging Scanners System Controller: the heart of the system that allows operators to interact with the system via the User Interface. Manages Data store which stores catalog of all the laundry/Smart Tags in the system. Data Store: storage medium that stores all the system data. User Interface: subsystem that allows human interaction with the system Conveyor Controller: received signal from System Controller to rotate the conveyor and stops when requested Smart Tag is found Conveyor: modified conveyor with smart tag embedded in the laundry slots to identify the location of the laundry slot.