A New Two-Stage Approach for a Bi-Objective Facility Layout Problem Considering Input/ Output Points Under Fuzzy Environment

Facility layout problem is one of the most important problems in a huge range of industries and services organizations. Simultaneous study of some qualitative and quantitative parameters like closeness relationship between facilities, physical constraints such as input/output points and how to arrange facilities can play a key role to determine the facility layout. Considering these parameters can lead to reduce production costs, increase production capacity, and remove additional displacements. A two-stage approach is proposed to achieve these goals. In the first stage, a goal programming model is proposed to determine weights of the attributes based on the experts' opinions with different preference representation structures. Afterwards, the closeness ratings of the facilities are calculated using weights of attributes. In the second stage, an efficient layout is designed by determining facilities placement sequence, location of the next facility adjacent to the previous one, location of input/output points, and rectilinear feasible shortest path between facilities. Two meta-heuristic algorithms including particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithm are designed due to computational complexity. The objective function is to minimize the sum of products distance between facilities and closeness rating and also to minimize the dead space. A case study of an Auto Body Parts company is demonstrated to verify the efficiency of the proposed two-stage approach. Furthermore, in order to assess the performance of the proposed approach, a comparison is drawn between the proposed approach and five existing approaches in the literature to solve different problems by using the two meta-heuristic algorithms.