Solystic

Bruno Volta

Emmanuel Miette

Luc Chirol

Christophe Caillon

Laurent Pellegrin

Jean Rieu

Eric Moullard

Belkacem Benyoub

Fabrice Eyraud

Agnes Philippe

Celine Guignard

Christophe Czukor

Gilles Arcas-Luque

Céline Guignard

Eric Deschamps

Agnès Philippe

An installation for sorting postal parcels or packets, has a carousel sorting conveyor having transport bins that are moved around a closed loop over a plurality of sorting outlets formed by respective storage receptacles, a feed magazine in which bulk stored parcels are put into series and then injected into the transport bins of the conveyor while it is moving, and a monitoring and control unit that acts on the bins of the sorting conveyor so as to open each of them over a receptacle that corresponds to a delivery address of the article following a sorting plan, includes a first sorting pass to sort parcels into first receptacles that are of high bulk storage capacity, and a subsequent sorting pass where the parcels are sorted into second receptacles that are smaller than the first receptacles.

Installation for sorting postal parcels or packets

A parcel-sorting facility for sorting parcels () comprises a conveyor () and receptacles () situated at sorting outlets () and corresponding to destination addresses of the parcels. Each sorting outlet is shared between a plurality of receptacles, only one of which is in a position (P) for receiving parcels. A receptacle exchanger device () for exchanging receptacles is assigned to each outlet, and is configured for exchanging the receptacle in the receiving position at a given outlet with another of the receptacles sharing the outlet, and the sorting facility anticipates the arrival of a parcel at the outlet by placing the receptacle associated with the destination of this parcel in the receiving position whenever necessary.

Sharing of parcel sorter outlets

A sorting facility () for sorting parcels (), has a sorting conveyor (), sorting outlets () distributed along said conveyor, and a monitoring and control unit () for controlling the conveyor so as to sort the parcels into the outlets as a function of their destination addresses. Each outlet is arranged to store a plurality of receptacles (), each of which is associated with a parcel destination address in a memory of the unit. At each outlet, the facility has a swap-over device () for swapping the receptacles over. The unit controls the swap-over device so that a receptacle for which the destination address associated with it in the memory of the monitoring and control unit corresponds to the destination address of a current parcel to be sorted is held stationary in a filling position in which the receptacle is positioned under the sorting outlet so as to receive a parcel.

Parcel-sorting facility with a system for swapping receptacles over at sorting outlets

The method of sorting pre-sorted mailpieces in a postal sorting machine comprises the steps consisting in: detecting loading in the feed inlet of the machine of a batch of mailpieces pre-sorted by a mailer of the mailpieces on the basis of their delivery addresses; and, in response to said detection, loading, in the reference database of the address recognition system, a lexicon comprising the delivery addresses for only the pre-sorted mailpieces of the batch, and, by means of the monitoring and control unit and for each current mailpiece, comparing the result of the OCR reading with said delivery addresses of the lexicon so as to recognize the delivery address of said current mailpiece.

Method of sorting pre-sorted mailpieces

A method of merging postal articles with a stack of mailpieces that have already been machine-sorted into a delivery round comprises the following steps: inserting the postal articles in sequence into a sorting frame having slots; placing the stack of mailpieces on a merge table; displaying on a display screen of a monitoring and control unit an indication representative of a number of current postal articles to be merged, and of an insertion position at which the postal articles should be inserted into the stack of mailpieces; then manually taking from the frame the number of postal articles indicated on the screen, and inserting them into the stack to perform a current merger; and having the monitoring and control unit measure a distance before and after the current merger to detect any error in taking the postal articles from the frame.

Method of manually merging postal articles with a stack of mailpieces that are already sorted

A method of merging, on a table (), postal articles () with mailpieces () that are already sorted into a certain sorting order comprises the steps of pre-sorting the postal articles () in a sorting frame having vertical slots by means of an electronic station for assisting with sorting in the sorting frame, and then in using said station again for assisting the operative with merging the pre-sorted postal articles with the mailpieces.

Method of merging postal articles with already-sorted mailpieces on a table

Apparatus for assisting in merging postal articles with a stack of mailpieces that have already been sorted into a certain sequence, said apparatus comprising a merge table suitable for storing the stack of mailpieces on edge, a first camera suitable for forming a digital image of a current postal article to be merged with the stack of mailpieces, a second camera that observes the stack of mailpieces in the manner of an operator placed at one end of the merge table, and a monitoring and control unit with a display screen that is placed at the end of the merge table.

Apparatus for assisting in manually merging postal articles with a stack of mailpieces

A method of sorting mailpieces into a sorting frame having sorting slots where, in a sorting pass, and in a memory of a monitoring/control unit with a display screen, recording digital images of mailpieces to be sorted, each image including a delivery address; on the basis of each digital image of a mailpiece, generating a sorting code identifying a sorting slot of the sorting frame, and, in the memory, organizing the mailpieces into virtual stacks of images, each virtual stack of images corresponding to a stack of mailpieces placed in a stack in a sorting slot of the sorting frame and the images in each virtual stack of images being sequenced in the same order as the mailpieces in said stack of mailpieces; and in a subsequent sorting pass, displaying on the screen the images and a sorting code of said mailpieces organized in a virtual stack.

Method of sorting mailpieces using a sorting frame, with a virtual stack of mailpiece images being displayed

In this postal sorting process, ordered lists (C C ) of the sort codes affixed to the mail items are compiled in the handling sorting offices (CTA , CTA ), these lists being representative of the order of the rail items in the batches of mail items compiled during the handling sorting phase. These lists of codes are transferred from the handling sorting offices to the distribution sorting offices and during the processing of the batches of mail items in a distribution sorting office, the code read by machine on the mail items are compared with the codes extracted from said lists f codes with a view to recovering errors in reading said codes by machine.

Growing community of inventors

Gif sur Yvette, France

Bruno Volta