Artificial Immune System Based Algorithm for Supply Chain Oriented Facility Layout Design

Increasing global competition has enforced all members of supply chains to optimize their activities to achieve high performance and customer satisfaction. A company can improve its supply chain performance in terms of responsiveness and efficiency by means of good facility layout design. Facilities are the places in the supply chain network where product is stored, manufactured, assembled or fabricated. The transportation of material between facilities involves 20-50% of total operating expenses of the manufacturing enterprise. The design of facility layout includes the optimum arrangement of machines, storage buffer, material transport devices etc. The most commonly used objective in layout design is the minimization of material handling cost. The heuristic and non traditional optimization algorithms are the most valid methods to resolve this type of problem as it belongs to combinatorial type of problems. In this paper an attempt has been made to solve single row layout design problem using Artificial Immune System based algorithm. Single row layout is widely used in modern manufacturing setup due to its ease of flexibility in accommodating new facilities and products. Further the operational performance of the optimal layout is analyzed through simulation in terms of makespan and average machine utilization.