Abstract
The problem of Unequal Area Facility Layout Planning (UA-FLP) has been addressed by a large number of approaches considering a set of quantitative criteria. Moreover, more recently, the personal qualitative preferences of an expert designer or decision-maker (DM) have been taken into account too. This article deals with capturing more than a single DM’s personal preferences to obtain a common and collaborative design including the whole set of preferences from all the DMs to obtain more complex, complete, and realistic solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the preferences of more than one expert designer have been considered in the UA-FLP. The new strategy has been implemented on a Coral Reef Optimization (CRO) algorithm using two techniques to acquire the DMs’ evaluations. The first one demands the simultaneous presence of all the DMs, while the second one does not. Both techniques have been tested over three well-known problem instances taken from the literature and the results show that it is possible to obtain sufficient designs capturing all the DMs’ personal preferences and maintaining low values of the quantitative fitness function.
Highlights
The rapid technological change that the contemporary world is undergoing poses a series of opportunities and challenges for companies and for the productive structures of countries
A poor or irregular plant layout design can lead to longer waiting times, higher material handling costs (MHC), and reduced worker efficiency [2]
Algorithm applied to the Unequal Area Facility Layout Planning (UA-facility layout problem (FLP)), improving the solutions previously found in a wellknown set of problems
Summary
The rapid technological change that the contemporary world is undergoing poses a series of opportunities and challenges for companies and for the productive structures of countries. Each user evolved a population of the algorithm and, after a certain number of generations, an exchange of solutions was done, with the result that the final melody satisfied all users’ preferences In these kinds of designs, it is necessary to reflect on the intervention of multiple designers or evaluators. García-Hernández et al [48] put into practice a basic CRO algorithm applied to the UA-FLP, improving the solutions previously found in a wellknown set of problems. This paper deals with the collaborative incorporation of several expert designers’ knowledge into the design of a plant layout This is the first time that multiple users’ collaboration has been applied to the problem of UA-FLP.
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