Abstract
Low-carbon sustainable development has become the consensus of manufacturing enterprises to fulfill their social responsibilities. Facility layout is an essential part of manufacturing system planning. Current research has demonstrated the advantages of energy saving on the manufacturing system level where operational methods (e.g., energy-efficient production scheduling and path planning) can be utilized and do not require massive investment in the existing legacy system. However, these efforts are mostly based on the existing fixed facility layout. Meanwhile, although facility layout problems have been extensively studied so far, the related work seldom involves the optimization of energy consumption (EC) or other EC-related environmental impact indicators, and does not clearly reveal if EC can be an independent optimization objective in facility layout. Accordingly, whether the energy-saving potential of a manufacturing system can be further tapped through rational facility layout is the gap of the current study. To address this, an investigation into energy-saving oriented manufacturing workshop facility layout is conducted. Correspondingly, an energy-efficient facility layout (EFL) model for the multi-objective optimization problem that minimizes total load transport distance and EC is formulated, and a multi-objective particle swarm optimization-based method is proposed as the solution. Furthermore, experimental studies verify the effectiveness of the presented model and its solution, indicating that EC can be regarded as an independent optimization objective during facility layout, and EFL is a feasible energy-saving approach for a manufacturing system.
Highlights
Climate warming is a global environmental problem, and the main reason is the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
The concept of crowding distance is often applied in multi-objective optimization algorithms evaluating solutions by comparing the Pareto dominance relationship, e.g., non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) [44], which reflects the density of other solutions around one solution in solution search space
Though the rectangular area enveloping all facilities was increased by 6.42% after the layout optimization, the optimization objectives concerned in the efficient facility layout (EFL) model, i.e., Dtotal and Etotal, were reduced by 38.32% and 39.20%, respectively
Summary
Climate warming is a global environmental problem, and the main reason is the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The manufacturing industry has a responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the concept of low-carbon sustainable development has become its consensus. Other EC-related environmental impact indicators are seldom touched on It has been proved by numerous existing research that energy-efficient scheduling is a crucial approach to minimize the EC of machining systems with various forms (e.g., flow shop, job shop, and flexible job shop) [5–7], and energy-efficient path planning is beneficial to reducing transport EC [8]. The FLP is investigated from the perspective of energy saving in this study, and the corresponding model with transport distance and EC as the optimization objectives, namely the energy-efficient facility layout (EFL).
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
