Search

Materials, products and workers have to move in order to perform the daily schedule of the organizations. This movement which is done by vehicles or material handling systems is an important cost element for the organizations. A good facility layout design may reduce this cost by minimizing the interdepartmental flow. Till today, most of the facility layout planning studies have been focused on production facilities. On the other hand, having vehicles with high fuel consumption and having continuously moving personnel makes facility layout important for also military facilities. In this study, in order to remedy this deficiency in the literature, we focused on military facilities. In addition to conventional transportation costs, the allocation of infirmary and quick reaction team which affects human health and personnel safety has also considered. We presented a multi-objective mixed integer programming model for this bi-objective facility layout problem. We applied this model on a military facility problem which is created by utilizing real data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this article, a bi-objective facility layout problem (BOFLP) is considered by combining the objectives of minimization of the total material handling cost (quantitative) and the maximization of total closeness rating scores (qualitative), with the predetermined weights are assigned to the respective objectives. A simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is proposed to solve the BOFLP, as well as a comparison of SA with the previous works is provided. It is shown that the SA algorithm works better than the previous works; thus proving the fact that the proposed SA algorithm is an efficient method for solving BOFLP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm based on simulated annealing supplemented with tabu list for the Multi Objective Facility Layout Problem (MOFLP). It is a SA approach supplemented with a tabu list. The main advantage of this approach is that a short term memory provided by the tabu list can be used to avoid solution re-visits while preserving the stochastic nature of the SA method. The goal of the new hybrid heuristic algorithm is to find the solutions forming the set of efficient solutions (pareto optimal set) of the MOFLP's in a relatively short time. The hybrid meta-heuristic is illustrated with a practical example of plant with 8 departments and 4 objectives. An efficient set of layouts corresponding to pre-determined weights are obtained. And also the set of efficient pareto-optimal solutions of the problem are determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider the facility layout problem which combines the objective of minimization of the total material handling cost and the maximization of total closeness rating scores. Multi-objective optimization is the way to consider the two objectives at the same time. A simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is proposed to find the non-dominated solution (Pareto optimal) set approximately for the multi-objective facility layout problem we tackle. The Pareto optimal sets generated by the proposed algorithm was compared with the solutions of the previous algorithms for multi-objective facility layout problem. The results showed that the approximate Pareto optimal sets we have found include almost all the previously obtained results and many more approximate Pareto optimal solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a new meta-heuristic algorithm to solve a closed loop layout problem. The proposed algorithm applies a modified version of the recently invented migrating birds optimization method. The computational experiments show that in most of the benchmark problems the results obtained from the proposed migrating birds optimization method is better than those obtained by other methods which are published in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]