A Heuristic for Facility Layout Problem with Unidirectional Flow Path

Abstract

In this paper, a facility layout problem with unidirectional flow path is addressed. It is to assign a number of departments to available sites in the plant. It is assumed that the number of departments is equal to the number of available sites. The production system in the plant is job shop type. It produces many products, which require different processing sequences. The transporting paths between sites are pre-specified. They are unidirectional flow paths, A mathematical model and a heuristic to assign a set of departments to sites for minimizing the total traveling distance in transporting materials between departments are developed. The performance of the heuristic is investigated by testing with a number of problems. The obtained solutions from the developed heuristic are compared to the solutions from pairwise exchange method. For small size problems, the solutions are also compared to the optimal solutions from mathematical model, The results show that the performance of this heuristic is acceptable.