Facility location decisions are a critical element in strategic planning for a wide range of private and public ®rms. The rami®cations of siting facilities are broadly based and long-lasting, impacting numerous operational and logistical decisions. High costs associated with property acquisition and facility construction make facility location or relocation projects long-term investments. To ma...

The fundamental function of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS) is based on definition and recognition of a type of similarity among parts that should be produced in a planning period. Cell formation (CF) and cell layout design are two important steps in implementation of the CMS. This paper represents a new nonlinear mathematical programming model for dynamic cell formation that employs the ...

Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are a common representation of hierarchical relationships and are widely used in software and information engineering, system theory, and others. The usefulness depends on a readable, understandable and easy to remember layout. The key problem in making such a good layout is the reduction of numbers of arc crossings. We focus on the two layer problem and make a fr...

In this article we focus on approximation algorithms for facility location problems with subadditive costs. As examples of such problems, we present two facility location problems with stochastic demand and exponential servers, respectively inventory. We present a (1 + , 1)-reduction of the facility location problem with subadditive costs to a soft capacitated facility location problem, which i...

Reducing manufacturing lead times and minimizing work-in-process (WIP) inventories are the cornerstones of popular manufacturing strategies such as Lean, Quick Response, and Just-inTime Manufacturing. In this paper, we present a model that captures the relationship between facility layout and congestion-related measures of performance. We use the model to introduce a formulation of the facility...

This paper presents an extended formulation of the unequal area facilities block layout problem which explicitly considers uncertainty in material handling costs by use of expected value and standard deviations of product forecasts. This formulation is solved using a random keys genetic algorithm (RKGA) heuristic with a flexible bay construct of the departments and total facility area. It is sh...

— Facilities layout is a systematic and functional arrangement of different departments, machines, equipments and services in a manufacturing establishment. It is vitally important to have a well developed plant layout for all the available resources in an optimum manner and get the maximum out of the capacity of the facilities. The problem is of particular importance for Small and Medium Enter...

This paper presents an investigation of the applicability of a genetic approach for solving the construction site layout problem. This problem involves coordinating the use of limited site space to accommodate temporary facilities so that transportation cost of materials is minimized. The layout problem considered in this paper is characterized by affinity weights used to model transportation c...

This paper proposes a mathematical formulation for the facility layout problem (FLP) based on the generalized quadratic assignment problem (GQAP). The GQAP is a generalization of the NP-hard quadratic assignment problem (QAP) that allows multiple facilities to be assigned to a single location as long as the capacity of the location allows. As a case study, we adapt the GRASP with path-relinking...