Loop-based facility layout design under flexible bay structures

Ardavan Asef-Vaziri, Hossein Jahandideh and Mohammad Modarres

International Journal of Production Economics, 2017, vol. 193, issue C, 713-725

Abstract: We develop heuristic procedures for concurrent design of block layout, material flow network, and input and output stations. Unlike the common practice in the flexible bay structure layout design, our objective function includes both loaded and empty flow between pairs of I/O stations. This measure of effectiveness is the main determinant of the fleet size of the vehicles, which in turn is the major driver of the total investment and operational costs in vehicle-based material handling. Our work is the first to design flexible bay structure layouts for loop-based material flow patterns. We first develop heuristic algorithms to configure the layout on the foundations of a unidirectional loop flow pattern. The loop and stations are then designed on the promising layouts. A set of improvement algorithms provide a better integration of the layout, loop, and stations.

Keywords: Flexible bay structures (FBS); Loop based facility layout; Vehicle based material handling; Generalized traveling salesman problem (GTSP) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:proeco:v:193:y:2017:i:c:p:713-725

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2017.08.004

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