Railway transportation is playing a key role in the development of many new shale oil and gas reserves in North America. In the rush to develop new shale oil and gas plays, sites for railway transload terminals are often selected on the basis of land availability and environmental constraints before full consideration is given to rail design and operating requirements. The result can be termina...

In this paper, we address the problem of designing flexible plant layouts for manufacturing facilities where product demands are subject to variability. A flexible layout is one that maintains low material handling costs despite fluctuations in the product demand levels. We extend existing procedures for design of flexible layouts by (1) explicitly capturing the stochastic nature of product dem...

The Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) is one of the models used for the multi-row layout problem with facilities of equal area. There are a set of n facilities and a set of n locations. For each pair of locations, a distance is specified and for each pair of facilities a weight or flow is specified (e.g., the amount of supplies transported between the two facilities). The problem is to assign ...

The operating theater layout problem (OTLP) in a hospital aims to determine for a set of facilities their positions and orientations on the floor-layout of departments in a hospital subject to a set of constraints on distances, available areas, and non-overlapping facilities according to international medical standards and specifications. The OTLP has two main objectives: a quantitative objecti...

Interface builders and multi-media authoring tools only support the construction of static displays where the components of the display are known at design time (e.g., buttons, menus). High-level UIMSs and automated designers support more sophisticated displays but are not easy to use as they require dealing explicitly with elaborate abstract concepts. This paper describes a GUI development env...

Proper arrangement of facility layout is a key issue in management that influences efficiency and the profitability of the manufacturing systems. Parallel Row Ordering Problem (PROP) is a special case of facility layout problem and consists of looking for the best location of n facilities while similar facilities (facilities which has some characteristics in common) should be arranged in a row ...

A lot of Metaheuristics for solving dynamic combinatorial facility layout problems have been developed, but still require much computation time when the number of facilities or planning horizon is large. Dynamic facility layout should meet a dynamic change in both product mix and demand quantity of each product over a planning horizon by adjusting facility layout effectively under a given syste...

INTRODUCTION: The appropriate-use optimization of the limited spaces of the Iranian hospitals is believed to be a crucial step towards promoting the efficiency of these healthcare centers. The issue determining the optimization patterns of the layout of units has led to a lot of efforts by researchers as it increases the efficiency of the hospitals through patients’ improvement, changing the lo...

The majority of the issued facilities layout problems (FLPs) minimize the material handling cost and ignore other factors, such as area utilization, department shape and site shape size. These factors, however, might influence greatly the objective function and should give consideration. The research range of this paper is focus on the unequal areas department facilities layout problem, and imp...

A tree structure model has been proposed for representing the unequal-area facility layout. Each facility has a different rectangular shape specified by its area and aspect ratio. In this layout problem, based on the assumption that the shop floor has enough space for laying out the facilities, no constraint is considered for a shop floor. Objectives are minimizing total part movement between f...