The design of facility layouts involves a decision process which, in general, due to its complexity, has to be decomposed into several sub-problems, namely: the selection of the most adequate manufacturing processes, the planning of equipment and labour requirements, the allocation of manufacturing operations to machines, the grouping of machines into sections (cells or departments), the select...

With increasing production costs and constraints, demand has increased for manufacturers to minimize maintenance cost and product transport time. We address some aspects of this problem by examining how to choose the optimal layout of stations (machines or buffers) in a production facility based on how the station layout affects the maintenance and product transport times. Specifically, we cons...

A construction site represents a conflux of concerns, constantly calling for a broad and multi-criteria approach to solving problems related to site planning and design. As an important part of site planning and design, the objective of site-level facility layout is to allocate appropriate locations and areas for accommodating temporary site-level facilities such as warehouses, job offices, wor...

this paper offers an approach that could be useful for diverse types of layout problems or even area allocation problems. by this approach there is no need to large number of discrete variables and only by few continues variables large-scale layout problems could be solved in polynomial time. this is resulted from dividing area into discrete and continuous dimensions. also defining decision var...

This paper proposes a mathematical formulation for the facility layout problem (FLP) based on the generalized quadratic assignment problem (GQAP). The GQAP is a generalization of the NP-hard quadratic assignment problem (QAP) that allows multiple facilities to be assigned to a single location as long as the capacity of the location allows. As a case study, we adapt the GRASP with path-relinking...

Facility layout problems have been generally solved either hierarchically or integrated into other phases of plant design. In this paper, a hybrid method is introduced so that clustering and facilities layout can be simultaneously optimized. Each cluster is formed by a group of connected facilities and selection of the most appropriate cluster configuration is aimed. Since exact method by MIP i...