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Thinking Outside the Box -- or Maybe Just About the Box

Author(s): 
Thomas Hern (Bowling Green State Univ.) and David Meel (Bowling Green State Univ.)

Movie of the construction of the RSC

It is difficult to conceive of how a blank sheet of cardboard with cuts at appropriate points and to particular lengths is transformed into a box that is commonly used across the shipping industry. In order to get a clear sense of this, we provide a link to a movie that shows the SWF Companies (n.d.) CE-451 manufacturing a Regular Slotted Container.

Click here to see a movie of the CE-451 in action

Warning: The CE-451 movie is 12 MB and may take more than a minute to load.

What one sees in this movie are the blanks being loaded into a hopper and the robotic elements of the CE-451 taking those blanks and converting them into RSCs. What it does not show is how the cardboard was sliced, the positioning of those slices and how the slice lengths help maximize the volume capacity of the RSC.

Thomas Hern (Bowling Green State Univ.) and David Meel (Bowling Green State Univ.), "Thinking Outside the Box -- or Maybe Just About the Box," Convergence (February 2010), DOI:10.4169/loci003321