Abstract
This paper describes a new approach to facility layout planning using self-organization. The self-organization method is proposed to generate facility layout plans autonomously according to the material flow which emerges from the local interactions among potential fields generated by production elements. A case study of facility layout planning is presented for semiconductor manufacturing, in which it is difficult to find a proper layout because of large scale of the system and complex process flow. The effectiveness of the proposed method is discussed in the computer simulations by comparing with the current facility layout which is made by human experts in terms of the accumulated traveling distance of products.
