When workflow congestion is prevalent, minimizing total expected material handling time is more appropriate than minimizing a distanced-based objective in manufacturing facility layout design. We present a model labeled Full Assignment Problem with Congestion (FAPC), which simultaneously optimizes the layout and flow routing. FAPC is a generalization of the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), a...

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...

In the desgin-process of a facility layout, the focus has been mainly on the placement of the machine resources. The material-ow, and therefore the desgin of the aisles has not appropriately been taken into account. We developed a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) to generate the aisles in a facility layout at minimal xed and variable cost. The application of the GA to a practical problem leads to ...

We present a new framework for efficiently finding competitive solutions for the facility layout problem. This framework is based on the combination of two new mathematical programming models. The first model is a relaxation of the layout problem and is intended to find good starting points for the iterative algorithm used to solve the second model. The second model is an exact formulation of t...

The inter-cell layout problem is discussed and a mathematical formulation for material flow between the cells is presented. The problem is modeled as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP). An ant algorithm is developed to solve the formulated problem. The performance of the proposed ant algorithm is compared to the facility layout algorithms such as H63, HC63-66, CRAFT and Bubble Search as well ...

Ž . In this paper a solution in the continual plane to the Facility Layout Problem FLP is presented. It is based on Simulated Ž . Annealing SA , a relatively recent algorithm for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems, like FLP. This approach Ž . may be applied either in General Facility Layout Problems GFLP considering facilities areas, shapes and orientations or in Ž . Machine Layou...