Optimum Facility Design Considering Flow Obstruction

In this study, we have classified different types of problems which are related to facility planning and layout design for different types of manufacturing processes. The main problems which are related to location of facilities which also affects the system performance such as distribution of man, material and machine in a plant or a factory and their optimization technique while using of mathematical models, their solutions and application related to whole problems is presented. For solving this type of problems, intelligent techniques such as expert systems, fuzzy logic and neutral networks have been used. In this paper the recent analysis on facility layout is incorporated and facility layout problem is surveyed. Many intelligent techniques and conventional algorithms for solving FLP are presented. The effect of workflow obstruction is a major concern in facility layout design. Yet, despite the wide amount of research conducted on the facility layout problem, very little has been done to incorporate obstruction as part of an overall approach to layout design. This paper examines the impact of workflow obstruction considerations on facility layout analyses. Linear and nonlinear integer programming formulations of the problem are presented. The structural properties of the resulting formulations, as applied to facility design, are investigated. Finally, a multi-objective approach to facility layout design is presented, incorporating the usual distance-based objective with that of workflow interference. Keywords—Facility Planning, Material handling Optimization method 714 Abhishek Kumar Jain and P.M.Mishra INTRODUCTION Future manufacturing system needs to be dynamically reconfigurable to produce customized products in small batch with fast turn-around times in cost-efficient manner. The capability to reconfigure an existing manufacturing system is a key factor to maintain competitiveness in manufacturing business environment. Suggested that in order to be successful in today’s competitive manufacturing environment, managers have to look for new approaches to facilities planning. A factory or a plant is the manufacturing facility of a company. A warehouse is the storage facility of a manufacturing or a distribution Company. By proper planning of these facilities would definitely reduce the total cost of operation and maintenance. Facility setup without proper planning causes following events:  Sell of the facility to other companies.  Close down the operations.  Relocate facility to a new location. Wrong selection of the family may lead to a failure of the complete project. By considering two primary parameters cost and distance many models have been made which helped to take decision in this field. The readers who want to share his idea to learn about facility location models are referred to the works of Francis and White (1974) [1]. , Handler and Mirchandani (1979) [2]. , Love,Morris, and Wesolowsky (1988) [3]. , Francis, McGinnis, and White (1992) [4]. Mirchandani and Francis (1990) [5]. , Daskin (1995) [6]. , Drezner (1995) [7]. , Drezner and Hamacher (2002) [8]. , Nickel and Puerto (2005) [9]. , Church and Murray (2009) [10] and Farahani and Hekmatfar (2009) [11]. Simulation studies are used to measure the advantage and performance of given layouts (Aleisa & Lin, 2005) [12]. Unfortunately, layout problems are known to be complex and are generally NPHard (Garey & Johnson, 1979) [13]. Finally, a tremendous amount of research has been carried out in this area during the last decades. A few surveys have been published to review the different trends and research directions in this area. However, these surveys are either not recent (Hassan, 1994 [14]; Kusiak & Heragu, 1987 [15]; Levary & Kalchik, 1985) [16], or focus on a very specific aspect of layout design, such as loop layouts (Asef-Vaziri & Laporte, 2005) [17], dynamic problems (Balakrishnan & Cheng, 1998) [18] and design through evolutionary approaches (Pierreval, Caux, Paris, & Viguier, 2003) [19]. Benjaafar, Heragu, and Irani (2002) [20] conducted a prospective analysis and given their suggestion in research directions. The objective of layout planning is classified into two categories: a) Quantitative type, b) Qualitative type. Quantitative is related to material handling cost and qualitative type is related to distance closeness rating. Objective is to minimize the material handling cost and maximize total distance closeness rating. The covering model which is most popular model and critical predefined number is called coverage distance or coverage radius (Fallah, NaimiSadigh, & Aslanzadeh, 2009) [21].Many problems like selection of location for police station, hospital, school can be easily formulated as covering problems. (Francis & White, 1974) [1]. Schilling, Jayaraman, and Barkhi (1993) [22] showed the literature review on covering problems in facility location. Schilling et al. (1993) [22] classify models which use the concept of Optimum Facility Design Considering Flow Obstruction 715 covering in two categories: (1) Set Covering Problem (SCP) where coverage is required and (2) Maximal Covering Location Problem (MCLP) where coverage is optimized. Owen and Daskin (1998) [23] have shown overview on facility location considering dynamic characteristics. Conforti, Cornuéjols, Kapoor, and VuŠkovic ́ (2001) [24] study results and also problems on perfect, ideal and balanced metrics which are related to set packing and set covering problem. Berman Drezner and Krass (2010b) [25] had shown their overview of covering model concentrate on three areas: (i) gradual covering model, (ii) cooperative covering model and (iii) variable radius model. LAYOUT FORMULATION The characteristics of any manufacturing unit either it is related to static or dynamic, there are different types of mathematical model is formulated. Such models can based on different principles, which consist in graph theory (Kim & Kim, 1995 [26]; Leung, 1992 [27]; Proth, 1992 [28]) or neural network (Tsuchiya, Bharitkar, & Takefuji, 1996) [29]. These models are used as a suggestive solutions to the layout problems which most generally used by the researchers consider as optimization problems, with either single or multiple objectives. Depending on discrete or continuous, the formulations found in the literature can lead to Quadratic Assignment Problems (QAP) or Mixed Integer Programming’s (MIP). By considering the palnt as a discrete, the whole plant is divided into small rectangular area which is called as a facility (Fruggiero, Lambiase, & Negri, 2006) [30]. If facilities have unequal areas, they can occupy different blocks (Wang, Hu, & Ku, 2005) [31]. A formulation, which is related to determining the relative locations of facilities so as to minimize the total material handling cost, is as follows (Balakrishnan, Cheng, & Wong, 2003) [32]: