A design procedure for improving the effectiveness of fractal layouts formation

Abstract

AbstractRecently, new types of layouts have been proposed in the literature in order to handle a large number of products. Among these are the fractal layout, aiming at minimization of routing distances. There are already researchers focusing on the design; however, we have noticed that the current approach usually executes several times the allocations of fractal cells on the shop floor up to find the best allocations, which may present a significant disadvantage when applied to a large number of fractal cells owing to combinatorial features. This paper aims to propose a criterion, based on similarity among fractal cells, developed and implemented in a Tabu search heuristics, in order to allocate it on the shop floor in a feasible computational time. Once our proposed procedure is modeled, operations of each workpiece are separated in n subsets and submitted to simulation. The results (traveling distance and makespan) are compared to distributed layout and to functional layout. The results show, in general, a trade-off behavior, that is, when the total routing distance decreases, the makespan increases. Based on our proposed method, depending on the value of segregated fractal cell similarity, it is possible to reduce both performance parameters. Finally, we conclude the proposed procedure shows to be quite promising because allocations of fractal cells demand reduced central processing unit time.