| A facilities layout, also called plant layout, consists of the production areas, production related or support areas and personnel areas within the building. Plant layout design is one of the strategic fields that determine the long run efficiency of operation.; This dissertation proposes an efficient and flexible plant layout algorithm to minimize the material handling cost and deal with change in future. A material flow forecasting tool, a scheduling module related to layout design and an evaluation method of flexible layouts are also proposed by this dissertation. A computer-based system will be developed to integrate all of the functions.; The first chapter of this paper introduces the issues in plant layout design. Because the volume and the mix of products to be produced are typically not known with certainty nor are they static over time, it is desirable to design a flexible layout to accommodate these changes. Chapter two gives a brief review of various algorithms and programs of layout design. Chapter three provides insight into the approach taken for the proposed flexible layout design. Then it presents all major algorithms involved in forecasting, pair exchange layout design, flexible layout design and evaluation. Chapter four is concerned with the computer-based system analysis and design. Chapter five uses several case studies to validate the algorithms and computer system. Chapter six explains the contributions of this research. Chapter seven gives the conclusions and future work. |
