Use of Genetic Algorithm in Layout Design

Abstract

Within the design of production layout, the planners are often confronted with complex, sometimes conflicting demands and a number of restrictive conditions, which encourages their efforts to develop new, progressive approaches to the development of production layouts. The purpose of the innovative approaches in this field is to provide users with better, elaborated designs in less time, while they are able to implement various restrictive conditions and company priorities to the design. One of the ways is a use of metaheuristic algorithms by space solution optimisations of manufacturing and logistics systems. These methods have higher quality results compared to classical heuristic methods. Genetic algorithms belong to this group. Main goal of this article is to describe the Genetic Algorithm Layout Planner (GALP) that was developed by authors, and its experimental verification and comparison with results of the classical heuristic. minimum crossing. However, in case of PLAN/OPT algorithm, there is a crossing, where material flow keeps coming back and there is not any technology island creation in manufacturing system. Genetic algorithm proposed layout with greatly lower value of transportation performance (38.18%) than heuristic algorithm in a PLAN/OPT module. Experiment result comparison is stated in table 2.