Formulating and solving sustainable stochastic dynamic facility layout problem: a key to sustainable operations

Abstract

Abstract:Facility layout design, a NP Hard problem, is associated with the arrangement of facilities in a manufacturing shop floor, which impacts the performance, and cost of system. Efficient design of facility layout is a key to the sustainable operations in a manufacturing shop floor. An efficient layout design not only optimizes the cost and energy due to proficient handling but also increase flexibility and easy accessibility. Traditionally, it is solved using meta-heuristic techniques. But these algorithmic or procedural methodologies do not generate effective and efficient layout design from sustainable point of view, where design should consider multiple criteria such as demand fluctuations, material handling cost, accessibility, maintenance, waste and more. In this paper, to capture the sustainability in the layout design these parameters are considered, and a new Sustainable Stochastic Dynamic Facility Layout Problem (SDFLP) is formulated and solved. SDFLP is optimized for material handling cost and rearrangement cost using various meta-heuristic techniques. The pool of layouts thus generated is then analyzed by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to identify efficient layouts. A novel hierarchical methodology of consensus ranking of layouts is proposed which combines the multiple attributes/criteria. Authors' Reply to Reviewers' CommentsWe are grateful to the reviewers for their insightful observations which have significantly improved our manuscript. We hope that the revised version of the paper addresses all issues and queries raised by the reviewers, and our responses to both the reviewers' comments are provided below.Authors' reply to Reviewer # 1 Overall comment:This paper proposes a methodology to solve the SDFLP from a sustainable perspective. The methodology is mainly composed of generating alternative layouts for FLP by SA and CSA, identifying efficient layouts by EDA, and ranking the layouts based on the AHP, the TOPSIS and the Consensus Ranked method.However, there exist many shortcomings that impede the acceptance of the paper Response:We are thankful to the reviewer for the insightful comment. We have strictly followed the suggestions to remove the shortcomings from the revised paper and have incorporated all the suggestions/comments raised by the reviewer # 1 in the revised manuscript. The detailed responses for each comment are provided below. Comment # 1:All the applied methods have been widely used in the workshop facility layout planning.The authors claim to solve the FLP from a sustainable perspective; however, a simple integration of all the methods is not enough. The generation of layouts is the most crucial part for obtaining a sustainable layout for the facility layout problem. As far as I know, much practical constraints can be converted into the "objective functions" or "constraints" when establishing mathematical NP-hard models and applying meta-heuristics to obtain the alternative layouts. If the authors can add more restrictions in the first step, the complexity of the followi...

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