Optimal Design of the Facility Layout using Improved Particle Swarm Optimization

Due to the increased competition in manufacturing industries play a driving force towards reducing the manufacturing costs by efficient design of facility layout. The success of manufacturing industries depends on the design of the facility that is able to adapt quickly and effectively for any changes in market requirements, technological changes, etc. The Facility Layout Problem (FLP) is a common industrial problem of allocating facilities to either maximize adjacency requirement or minimize the cost of transporting materials between them. The objective of the minimization of transportation cost from one department to other is calculated by multiplying together the flow distance with unit transportation cost per distance for each facility pair. Several researchers have used different methodologies for getting the better solutions of facility layout problems. This research proposed a methodology for getting the optimal design of the facility layout problems using the optimization method like particle optimization technique and genetic algorithm. The improved Particle swarm optimization technique has used to design a plant layout for minimizing material handling cost under the constraints of aspect ratios, dimensions of facilities and passages. The optimum result has been generated using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm written in programming language C. A comparative study has carried out with the existing algorithm and tested the performance of the proposed algorithm. In this study a generalized form of FLP is formulated to find the optimum layout configuration for different no of facilities, different areas of facility, different passage configuration etc.