2004 Volume 55 Issue 3 Pages 111-120
The design of the physical layout is the most important issue to be considered in the early stages of manufacturing system design. Operating costs and system efficiency are significantly affected by material handling. Generally, the facility layout problem is to find an optimal layout with respect to minimizing material handling costs between departments. In most existing studies on the problem, the distance between departments is assumed to be the rectilinear distance between the centers of the departments. Those approaches ignore the existence of aisle and I/O points in each department. A new design methodology for the facility layout problem is presented in this paper. Our objective is to minimize the penalty for the redundant aisle areas and irregular shapes of departments, besides material handling costs. The material movements assume that they are transferred along the shortest aisles between the I/O points of those departments. In this paper, a new layout expression based on location matrix and some heuristics are proposed for determining aisle structure and I/O points. In the new layout expression, the I/O points of each department are located according to intradepartment material flows. We develop an improvement-type layout algorithm based on simulated annealing. In this paper, we propose a new design methodology for the facility layout problem that considers the aisle structure and I/O points of each department. There are three types of I/O points (U, L and I type) and they are decided to minimize the objective while maintaining access to the aisle. Experimental results show that our approach performs quite well for the minimization of material handling costs and the aisle areas.
