Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2010
College/Unit
Statler College of Engineering and Mining Resources
Department/Program/Center
Industrial and Managements Systems Engineering
Abstract
The dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) is the problem of finding positions of departments on the plant floor for multiple periods (material flows between departments change during the planning horizon) such that departments do not overlap, and the sum of the material handling and rearrangement costs is minimized. In this paper, the departments may have unequal-areas and free orientations, and the layout for each period is generated on the continuous plant floor. Because of the complexity of the problem, only small-size problems can be solved in reasonable time using exact techniques. As a result, a boundary search (construction) technique, which places departments along the boundaries of already placed departments, is developed for the DFLP. The solution is improved using a tabu search heuristic. The heuristics were tested on some instances from the DFLP and static facility layout problem (SFLP) literature. The results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristics.
Digital Commons Citation
McKendall, Alan and Hakobyan, Artak, "Heuristics for the Dynamic Facility Layout Problem with Unequal-area Departments" (2010). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 3046.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/3046