Abstract
The unequal-area facility layout problem (UA-FLP) is the problem of locating rectangular facilities on a rectangular floor space such that facilities do not overlap while optimizing some objective. The objective considered in this paper is minimizing the total distance materials travel between facilities. The UA-FLP considered in this paper considers facilities with fixed dimension and was motivated by the investigation of layout options for a production area at the Toyota Motor Manufacturing West Virginia (TMMWV) plant in Buffalo, WV, USA. This paper presents a mathematical model and a genetic algorithm for locating facilities on a continuous plant floor. More specifically, a genetic algorithm, which consists of a boundary search heuristic (BSH), a linear program, and a dual simplex method, is developed for an UA-FLP. To test the performance of the proposed technique, several test problems taken from the literature are used in the analysis. The results show that the proposed heuristic performs well with respect to solution quality and computational time.
Highlights
This research was motivated by the investigation of layout options for the machining department within the transmission production area of the Toyota Motor Manufacturing
The proposed genetic algorithm (GA) results are compared with the results from the tabu search (TS) heuristic which consisted of the boundary search heuristic (TS/BSH) presented in McKendall and Hakobyan [18] and the multistart simulated annealing algorithm (MS-SA) presented in Allahyari and Azab [16]
The unequal-area facility layout problem (UA-FLP) is considered in this paper and is defined as the problem of locating rectangular facilities, with fixed dimensions, on a rectangular floor space such that facilities do not overlap while minimizing the total weighted distance (TWD)
Summary
West Virginia (TMMWV) plant in Buffalo (West Virginia, USA). The plant manufactures automobile engines and automatic transmissions for specific Toyota models. TMMWV made modifications to one of its products, which required an investigation of the layout of the machining department within the transmission production area. Two pieces of equipment used to clean products will be replaced by a single piece of equipment As a result, this required a re-layout of the machining department which consisted of cells and other pieces of equipment, which are called facilities. Since the transportation cost is difficult to obtain, this paper considers minimizing the total weighted distance (i.e., the sum of the product of the flow of materials and distance between each pair of facilities). In the TMMWV plant, the addition and deletion of products as well as the replacement of pieces of equipment caused the existing layout of one of its machining departments to be less efficient with respect to material handling costs. See Francis et al [2] for a list of factors which may require a re-layout of a manufacturing facility
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
