MINIMIZING WORK-IN-PROCESS AND MATERIAL HANDLING IN THE FACILITIES LAYOUT PROBLEM

We consider the plant layout problem for a job shop environment. This problem is generally treated as the quadratic assignment problem with the objective of minimizing material handling costs. Here we investiga te the relationship between material handling costs and average work-i n-process. Under restrictive assumptions, an open queueing network mod el can be used to show that the problem of minimizing work-in-process reduces to the quadratic assignment problem. In this paper, we general ize these results through a simulation model, and develop a simple sec ondary measure which allows us to select the layout that minimizes ave rage work-in-process levels from among solutions that are similar with respect to the objective function for the quadratic assignment proble m.