Facility layout planning. An extended literature review

[EN] Facility layout planning (FLP) involves a set of design problems related to the arrangement of the elements that shape industrial production systems in a physical space. The fact that they are considered one of the most important design decisions as part of business operation strategies, and their proven repercussion on production systems' operation costs, efficiency and productivity, mean that this theme has been widely addressed in science. In this context, the present article offers a scientific literature review about FLP from the operations management perspective. The 232 reviewed articles were classified as a large taxonomy based on type of problem, approach and planning stage and characteristics of production facilities by configuring the material handling system and methods to generate and assess layout alternatives. We stress that the generation of layout alternatives was done mainly using mathematical optimisation models, specifically discrete quadratic programming models for similar sized departments, or continuous linear and non-linear mixed integer programming models for different sized departments. Other approaches followed to generate layout alternatives were expert's knowledge and specialised software packages. Generally speaking, the most frequent solution algorithms were metaheuristics.The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union H2020 Program under grant agreement No 958205 `Industrial Data Services for Quality Control in Smart Manufacturing (i4Q)'and from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under grant agreement RTI2018-101344-B-I00 `Optimisation of zerodefectsproduction technologies enabling supply chains 4.0 (CADS4.0)'Pérez-Gosende, P.; Mula, J.; Díaz-Madroñero Boluda, FM. (2021). Facility layout planning. An extended literature review. International Journal of Production Research. 59(12):3777-3816. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2021.189717637773816591

Overview of Multi-Objective Optimization Approaches in Construction Project Management

The difficulties that are met in construction projects include budget issues, contractual time constraints, complying with sustainability rating systems, meeting local building codes, and achieving the desired quality level, to name but a few. Construction researchers have proposed and construction practitioners have used optimization strategies to meet various objectives over the years. They started out by optimizing one objective at a time (e.g., minimizing construction cost) while disregarding others. Because the objectives of construction projects often conflict with each other, single-objective optimization does not offer practical solutions as optimizing one objective would often adversely affect the other objectives that are not being optimized. They then experimented with multi-objective optimization. The many multi-objective optimization approaches that they used have their own advantages and drawbacks when used in some scenarios with different sets of objectives. In this chapter, a review is presented of 16 multi-objective optimization approaches used in 55 research studies performed in the construction industry and that were published in the period 2012–2016. The discussion highlights the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches when used in different scenarios

Cuckoo search algorithm for construction site layout planning

A novel metaheuristic optimization algorithm based on cuckoo search algorithm (CSA) is presented to solve the construction site layout planning problem (CSLP). CSLP is a complex optimization problem with various applications, such as plant layout, construction site layout, and computer chip layout. Many researchers have investigated the CSLP by applying many algorithms in an exact or heuristic approach. Although both methods yield a promising result, technically, nature-inspired algorithms demonstrate high achievement in successful percentage. In the last two decades, researchers have been developing a new nature-inspired algorithm for solving different types of optimization problems. The CSA has gained popularity in resolving large and complex issues with promising results compared with other nature-inspired algorithms. However, for solving CSLP, the algorithm based on CSA is still minor. Thus, this study proposed CSA with additional modification in the algorithm mechanism, where the algorithm shows a promising result and can solve CSLP cases.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Dynamic Facility Layout for Cellular and Reconfigurable Manufacturing using Dynamic Programming and Multi-Objective Metaheuristics

The facility layout problem is one of the most classical yet influential problems in the planning of production systems. A well-designed layout minimizes the material handling costs (MHC), personnel flow distances, work in process, and improves the performance of these systems in terms of operating costs and time. Because of this importance, facility layout has a rich literature in industrial engineering and operations research. Facility layout problems (FLPs) are generally concerned with positioning a set of facilities to satisfy some criteria or objectives under certain constraints. Traditional FLPs try to put facilities with the high material flow as close as possible to minimize the MHC. In static facility layout problems (SFLP), the product demands and mixes are considered deterministic parameters with constant values. The material flow between facilities is fixed over the planning horizon. However, in today’s market, manufacturing systems are constantly facing changes in product demands and mixes. These changes make it necessary to change the layout from one period to the other to be adapted to the changes. Consequently, there is a need for dynamic approaches of FLP that aim to generate layouts with high adaptation concerning changes in product demand and mix. This thesis focuses on studying the layout problems, with an emphasis on the changing environment of manufacturing systems. Despite the fact that designing layouts within the dynamic environment context is more realistic, the SFLP is observed to have been remained worthy to be analyzed. Hence, a math-heuristic approach is developed to solve an SFLP. To this aim, first, the facilities are grouped into many possible vertical clusters, second, the best combination of the generated clusters to be in the final layout are selected by solving a linear programming model, and finally, the selected clusters are sequenced within the shop floor. Although the presented math-heuristic approach is effective in solving SFLP, applying approaches to cope with the changing manufacturing environment is required. One of the most well-known approaches to deal with the changing manufacturing environment is the dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP). DFLP suits reconfigurable manufacturing systems since their machinery and material handling devices are reconfigurable to encounter the new necessities for the variations of product mix and demand. In DFLP, the planning horizon is divided into some periods. The goal is to find a layout for each period to minimize the total MHC for all periods and the total rearrangement costs between the periods. Dynamic programming (DP) has been known as one of the effective methods to optimize DFLP. In the DP method, all the possible layouts for every single period are generated and given to DP as its state-space. However, by increasing the number of facilities, it is impossible to give all the possible layouts to DP and only a restricted number of layouts should be fed to DP. This leads to ignoring some layouts and losing the optimality; to deal with this difficulty, an improved DP approach is proposed. It uses a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm to select the initial layouts for DP that lead to the best solution of DP for DFLP. The proposed approach includes two phases. In the first phase, a large set of layouts are generated through a heuristic method. In the second phase, a genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to search for the best subset of layouts to be given to DP. DP, improved by starting with the most promising initial layouts, is applied to find the multi-period layout. Finally, a tabu search algorithm is utilized for further improvement of the solution obtained by improved DP. Computational experiments show that improved DP provides more efficient solutions than DP approaches in the literature. The improved DP can efficiently solve DFLP and find the best layout for each period considering both material handling and layout rearrangement costs. However, rearrangement costs may include some unpredictable costs concerning interruption in production or moving of facilities. Therefore, in some cases, managerial decisions tend to avoid any rearrangements. To this aim, a semi-robust approach is developed to optimize an FLP in a cellular manufacturing system (CMS). In this approach, the pick-up/drop-off (P/D) points of the cells are changed to adapt the layout with changes in product demand and mix. This approach suits more a cellular flexible manufacturing system or a conventional system. A multi-objective nonlinear mixed-integer programming model is proposed to simultaneously search for the optimum number of cells, optimum allocation of facilities to cells, optimum intra- and inter-cellular layout design, and the optimum locations of the P/D points of the cells in each period. A modified non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (MNSGA-II) enhanced by an improved non-dominated sorting strategy and a modified dynamic crowding distance procedure is used to find Pareto-optimal solutions. The computational experiments are carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed MNSGA-II against other popular metaheuristic algorithms

An Invistigation About The Fuzzy Logic Aplications In Construction Management

In this study some fuzzy logic aplications in Construction Management (CM) discipline has been investigated. By this way tried to have an idea about the usifulness and practicability of fuzzy logic in the area of CM. For the aim of investigation of the fuzzy logic aplications’ provides in CM discipline; there have been made a literature invistigation on different sub-branches of CM. Because of CM is a very large area, this invistigations’ scope is determined on the some top quality journals’ papers in the Science Situation Index (SCI). Chosen researchs’ results from this investigations given in the text. It’s confirmed that the applications in this area before, scattered in four main categories, including: decision making, performance, evaluation/assessment; and modeling. Olso optimisation is another aim for using fuzzy logic

Method For Generating And Evaluating Project Schedules For Factory Relocations As Part Of Reorganisation Projects

The article addresses a method for generating project schedules for factory relocations based on a planned layout concept in reorganisation projects. The layout is modelled in a cell grid with cells of uniform edge length. The factory objects are arranged in this grid for both the actual and the target layout state. Further input parameters relate to the required time and personnel resources according to several operations. A two-stage optimisation algorithm is presented, which first checks a given solution for layout feasibility and then generates and solves a project scheduling problem on this basis. Accordingly, elements of the facility layout problem are integrated into a resource constrained project scheduling problem. The process steps of generating and evaluating of the project schedule are further embedded in a genetic algorithm, which successively improves the solution. The project schedules for relocation are evaluated through a combination of the resulting project duration and the downtimes of all factory objects. The aim of the optimisation is to minimise both objective values considering a weighting factor. The article concludes by validating the method using a practical example