2023 Volume 17 Issue 2 Pages 101-106
At present, because of diverse user needs, types and construction of products tend to be fractionated and complicated. Material handling costs at large-scale production facilities, regarded as an important factor, are said to account for about 15%–75% of all factory costs. Therefore, to achieve higher efficiency and lower production costs, conventional single floor buildings are being replaced by multi-floor buildings. Recently, when a new factory is designed, a few circular buildings are included in addition to rectangular buildings, which are still used frequently. Nevertheless, little development of multi-floor layouts has occurred for circular buildings. As the number of work sites at factories increase,the number of combinations of work sites (factory layout designs) is expected to increase exponentially. Therefore, a longer time is necessary for precise solutions using mathematical programming. Finding an optimal solution within a realistic calculating time is difficult. Therefore, to obtain a nearly optimal layout that approximates the best solution with high accuracy, some optimization method (meta-heuristic) must be used. For this study, a technique to produce a layout for a rectangular building and a circular building for a multi-floor factory using genetic algorithms (GAs) is used as one optimization method. The building shape is then subjected to comparative examination. Productivity values obtained according to the building shape, as calculated by the total material handling costs between work sites, are compared using numerical experiments to clarify the effectiveness of layout techniques for rectangular buildings and circular buildings.
