The unequal-areas facility layout problem is concerned with finding the optimal arrangement of a given number of non-overlapping indivisible departments with unequal area requirements within a facility. We present a convex-optimisation-based framework for efficiently finding competitive solutions for this problem. The framework is based on the combination of two mathematical programming models....

Plant layout design is related to the location of facilities (e.g. machines, departments) in a plant. They are known to greatly impact the system performance. Numerous research works related to facility layout have been published. A few literature reviews exist, but they are not recent or are restricted to certain specific aspects of these layout design. The literature analysis given here is re...

Facility layout selection is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem which primarily involves in evaluating multiple candidate layouts, designed according to a set of common criteria for choosing the best one. Designing multiple facility layouts is an easy task, thank to availability of different facility layout design software. However, the decision of selecting the best layout becomes...

In this study, we have classified different types of problems which are related to facility planning and layout design for different types of manufacturing processes. The main problems which are related to location of facilities which also affects the system performance such as distribution of man, material and machine in a plant or a factory and their optimization technique while using of math...

The facility layout problem is concerned with finding the most efficient arrangement of a given number of departments with unequal area requirements within a facility. The facility layout problem is a hard problem, and therefore, exact solution methods are only feasible for small or greatly restricted problems. In this paper, we propose a spring-embedding approach that unlike previous approache...

The facility layout problem is a well researched one. However few effective and user friendly approaches have been proposed. Since it is an NP hard problem, various optimization approaches for small problems and heuristic approaches for the larger problems have been proposed. For the most part the more effective algorithms are not user friendly. On the other hand user friendly methods have not ...