Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMSs) are designed to rapidly respond to changing market requirements. RMSs operate on various products grouped into families according to their operational requirements. Therefore, an RMS may require different layout configurations while switching from one product to the other. This paper investigates the criteria, which can influence on choosing layout co...

Layout design and the flow of materials have a significant impact on performance of manufacturing system (garments industry) .These can help to increase productivity, reduce work in process and inventory, short production lead time, streamlines the flow of materials, cost and reduce non value added activities from the production process of waiting and transportation, which make the factory meet...

Facility layout design is a strategic issue and has a significant and lasting impact on the efficiency of a manufacturing system. An ideal facility layout provides the optimum relationship among output, floor area and manufacturing process. Traditionally, the facility layout problem is solved using many methods like heuristics, Mathematical programming, Knowledge based approaches etc. This pape...

Do consumers' perceptions of product quality differ from measures of objective quality? This is an extremely important question for retailers to answer as they develop or alter their marketing strategies. Consumers may view products of equal quality quite differently. That perceived quality, in turn, would affect their purchase behavior. The general goal of this research was to determine if con...

500 Abstract— This research aims to improve the plant layout of manufacturing industry to make optimum space utilization, eliminate obstructions in material flow and thus obtain maximum productivity. The present layout and operation process of each section (i.e. material storage, cutting, machining shop, fabrication shop, assembly and inspection section and finish product storage) have been inv...

This paper describes the combination of previously-developed component placement and routing algorithms into an integrated computational approach to product layout optimization. Previ ous work introduced simulated annealing-based algorithms for optimal component packing (Szykman and Cagan, 1995), con strained layout (Szykman and Cagan, 1997), and routing (Szyk man and Cagan, 1996). These proble...

The need for effective apparel waste management is motivated by the increasing cost and decreasing availability of landfill space and the dwindling of natural resources. The aim of this study was to identify the current solid waste disposal and recycling practices of the apparel industry in South Africa and to determine their attitude and willingness towards recycling, their perception of the f...

Facing new challenges and more uncertainty, manufacturers see the need for flexible solutions and the need to strive to achieve flexibility. However, flexibility is still not well understood and no unambiguous understanding of flexibility exists. The paper first summarizes the state of the field of flexibility, exploring different definitions and understandings of the flexibility concept from t...

In an edge-colored graph, the cost incurred at a vertex on a path when two incident edges with different colors are traversed is called reload or changeover cost. The Minimum Changeover Cost Arborescence (MinCCA) problem consists in finding an arborescence with a given root vertex such that the total changeover cost of the internal vertices is minimized. It has been recently proved by Gözüpek e...