A heuristic procedure for the integrated facility layout design and flow assignment problem

✍ Scribed by Ali Taghavi; Alper Murat

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 516 KB
• Volume: 61
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0360-8352
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cie.2011.02.011

✦ Synopsis

a b s t r a c t

We present an efficient iterative heuristic procedure for solving the integrated layout design and product flow assignment problem. The layout design decisions involve planar location of unequal-area machines with duplicates. The product flows are assigned to machines according to the product processing routes. The integrated decision problem is a nonlinear mixed integer model which cannot be efficiently solved using classical methods for large problems. We propose a novel integrated heuristic procedure based on the alternating heuristic, a perturbation algorithm and sequential location heuristic. Since the alternating heuristic between facility layout design and product-machine assignment sub-problems terminates with local optima, we developed a perturbation algorithm based on assignment decisions. The results of an experimental study show that proposed procedure is both efficient and effective in identifying quality solutions for small to very large-sized problems.