Design and optimization of manufacturing facilities layouts

Abstract

The present paper deals with the design of manufacturing facilities layout with the consideration of downtime of facilities and space utilization using genetic algorithm (GA). The existing approaches to solve problems of unequal area facility layout in manufacturing environments can provide optimal solutions with limitations such as single design criterion, manual revision, and approximated shape. Also, importance to practical factors such as downtime of facilities owing to planned maintenance or failure of machines, and floor space utilization are addressed to a lesser degree. A mathematical model and a heuristic solution procedure for designing manufacturing facilities layouts that address the above-mentioned shortcomings are proposed. The proposed model minimizes the cost associated with material handling during normal and breakdown periods with due consideration of compactness of the layout. A heuristic placement procedure, which is capable of changing the orientation of facilities, is proposed to place the machines in the floor area, in order to obtain maximum space utilization. The proposed design approach is evaluated by solving different layout design problems taken from the literature and by solving an industrial case study. The results of the proposed GA optimizer are compared with results obtained from greedy search and simulated annealing methods. The results show that the approach performs better in most of the cases.

Holistic simulation-based optimisation methodology for facility layout design with consideration to production and logistics constraints

“…Some of the most used methods to deal with FLD problems are discrete-event simulation, meta-heuristics, hybrid meta-heuristics, and mathematical optimisation modelling approaches. 4,5,9,11,16–21 Several authors have used simulations for the design of facility layouts. Azadeh et al 8 presented an integrated approach with simulation and mathematical programming for the maintenance process of a gas transmission unit considering resilience engineering factors and several layout configurations.…”

A conceptual framework for integrating Facility Layout and Production Scheduling in Flowshop Manufacturing Cells decisions

“…The unequal-area facility layout problem (UAFLP) considers a continuous representation of the facility layout where departments cannot overlap, each department must meet the given area requirements and the dimensions of the sides of each department must meet a defined aspect ratio (Komarudin and Wong, 2010;Meller and Gau, 1996). The continuous representation of departments and their unequal area characteristics resembles real-world plant design decisions, thus optimizing this problem facilitates the final facility design process (Balamurugan et al, 2006;Liu and Liu, 2019;Liu and Meller, 2007). Also, an effective facility layout design can lead to the reduction of other mudas, such as unnecessary transportation of parts between departments and the travel distance between them, as well as unnecessary personnel movements (Cuatrecasas-Arbós, 2009).…”

A robust approach to design a single facility layout plan in dynamic manufacturing environments using a permutation-based genetic algorithm

“…20 GA can explore the solution space by adopting the concept of natural genetics and evolution theory. 21–23 There indeed exists a variety of articles contributing to the concept of GA application in DFLPs (see Table 1). However, according to Table 1, a smaller percentage of these researches are dedicated to DFLPs where there is an uncertainty of demand for each period of manufacturing (i.e.…”