Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 10-23-2021
College/Unit
Statler College of Engineering and Mining Resources
Department/Program/Center
Industrial and Managements Systems Engineering
Abstract
The unequal-area facility layout problem (UA-FLP) is the problem of locating rectangular facilities on a rectangular floor space such that facilities do not overlap while optimizing some objective. The objective considered in this paper is minimizing the total distance materials travel between facilities. The UA-FLP considered in this paper considers facilities with fixed dimension and was motivated by the investigation of layout options for a production area at the Toyota Motor Manufacturing West Virginia (TMMWV) plant in Buffalo, WV, USA. This paper presents a mathematical model and a genetic algorithm for locating facilities on a continuous plant floor. More specifically, a genetic algorithm, which consists of a boundary search heuristic (BSH), a linear program, and a dual simplex method, is developed for an UA-FLP. To test the performance of the proposed technique, several test problems taken from the literature are used in the analysis. The results show that the proposed heuristic performs well with respect to solution quality and computational time.
Digital Commons Citation
McKendall, Alan and Hakobyan, Artak, "An Application of an Unequal-Area Facilities Layout Problem with Fixed-Shape Facilities" (2021). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 3055.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/3055