A bay configuration arranged along a central spine and served by an automated monorail material handling system are common designs for the layout and material handling system in new semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities. This paper investigates the facility design problem in semiconductor fabrication facilities and proposes a procedure to determine the optimal spine layout design given a d...

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) to circumvent the need for repair operators after crossover and mutation. Because this probl...

A construction site represents a conflux of concerns, constantly calling for a broad and multi-criteria approach to solving problems related to site planning and design. As an important part of site planning and design, the objective of site-level facility layout is to allocate appropriate locations and areas for accommodating temporary site-level facilities such as warehouses, job offices, wor...

Today’s consumer market demands that manufacturers must be competitive. This requires the efficient operation of manufacturing plants and their ability to quickly respond to changes in product mix and demand. In addition, studies show that material handling cost make up between 20 and 50 percent of the total operating cost. Therefore, this paper considers the problem of arranging and rearrangin...

This paper proposes a non-greedy local search heuristic for solving facility layout problem. The proposed heuristic works on non-greedy systematic pair wise exchange of two facilities, that is 2-exchange local search based on non-greedy strategy. Pair wise exchanges are accepted if the objective function value after the exchange is lowered or smaller than the average objective function incremen...

A tree structure model has been proposed for representing the unequal-area facility layout. Each facility has a different rectangular shape specified by its area and aspect ratio. In this layout problem, based on the assumption that the shop floor has enough space for laying out the facilities, no constraint is considered for a shop floor. Objectives are minimizing total part movement between f...

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...

The dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) is the problem of finding positions of departments onthe plant floor for multiple periods (material flows between departments change during the planning horizon)such that departments do not overlap, and the sum of the material handling and rearrangement costs isminimized. In this paper a new optimization algorithm inspired from colonizing weeds, Invasi...