Semester
Spring
Date of Graduation
2008
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Type
PhD
College
Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources
Department
Industrial and Managements Systems Engineering
Committee Chair
Alan R McKendall, Jr
Abstract
The facility layout problem (FLP) is a well researched problem of finding positions of departments on a plant floor such that departments do not overlap and some objective(s) is (are) optimized. In this dissertation, the FLP with unequal area rectangular shaped departments is considered, when material flows between departments change during the planning horizon. This problem is known as the dynamic FLP. The change in material flows between pairs of departments in consecutive periods may require rearrangements of departments during the planning horizon in order to keep material handling costs low. The objective of our problem is to minimize the sum of the material handling and rearrangement costs. Because of the combinatorial structure of the problem, only small sized problems can be solved in reasonable time using exact techniques. As a result, construction and improvement heuristics are developed for the proposed problem. The construction algorithms are boundary search heuristics as well as a dual simplex method, and the improvement heuristics are tabu search and memetic heuristics with boundary search and dual simplex (linear programming model) techniques. The heuristics were tested on a generated data set as well as some instances from the literature. In summary, the memetic heuristic with the boundary search technique out-performed the other techniques with respect to solution quality.
Recommended Citation
Hakobyan, Artak, "Heuristics for the dynamic facility layout problem with unequal area departments" (2008). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 4376.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/4376