— Facilities layout is a systematic and functional arrangement of different departments, machines, equipments and services in a manufacturing establishment. It is vitally important to have a well developed plant layout for all the available resources in an optimum manner and get the maximum out of the capacity of the facilities. The problem is of particular importance for Small and Medium Enter...

The facility layout problem is a well researched one. However few effective and user friendly approaches have been proposed. Since it is an NP hard problem, various optimization approaches for small problems and heuristic approaches for the larger problems have been proposed. For the most part the more effective algorithms are not user friendly. On the other hand user friendly methods have not ...

Ž . In this paper a solution in the continual plane to the Facility Layout Problem FLP is presented. It is based on Simulated Ž . Annealing SA , a relatively recent algorithm for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems, like FLP. This approach Ž . may be applied either in General Facility Layout Problems GFLP considering facilities areas, shapes and orientations or in Ž . Machine Layou...

A bay configuration arranged along a central spine and served by an automated monorail material handling system are common designs for the layout and material handling system in new semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities. This paper investigates the facility design problem in semiconductor fabrication facilities and proposes a procedure to determine the optimal spine layout design given a d...

The facility layout problem is typically solved in what is referred to as a “top-down approach” of block layout design followed by detailed layout determination. However, a number of research efforts recently have challenged this approach, producing a “bottom-up approach to the facility layout problem” (Meller et al. 2004). In this paper we consider the bottom-up approach, applying a tighter fo...