Drawing a block plan from a REL chart with graph theory and a microcomputer

Abstract

Facilities layout is concerned with the arrangement and coordination of physical facilities. In this paper we describe a new method which achieves part of this aim—the drawing of a block plan. The BASIC (Microsoft Version 5.0) program derived from the approach is designed to run on a personal computer with 30K RAM, without graphics capability. It requires a REL chart as input. It has the unique feature that one of the facilities specified can be the area exterior to the building, allowing a user to specify whether or not certain facilities must be adjacent to the outside wall. The program attempts to maximize the sum of the REL Chart scores of adjacent pairs of facilities and is based on a graph theoretic formulation and heuristic for the layout problem. Although the method is designed to handle 10–20 facilities, there is effectively no limit to the number of facilities; the final plan has dimension of 80 × 60 characters.