REDUCING WORK-IN-PROCESS MOVEMENT FOR MULTIPLE PRODUCTS IN ONE-DIMENSIONAL LAYOUT PROBLEMS

This research describes a method to assign M machines, which are serve d by a material handling transporter, to M equidistant locations along a track, so that the distance traveled by a given set of jobs is mini mized. Traditionally, this problem (commonly known as a machine locati on problem) has been modeled as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP), which is N P-hard, thus motivating the need for efficient procedures t o solve instances with several machines. In this paper we develop a br anching heuristic to obtain sub-optimum solutions to the problem; a lo wer bound on the optimum solution has also been presented. Results obt ained from the heuristics are compared with results obtained from othe r heuristics with similar objectives. It is observed that the results are promising, and justify the usage of developed methods.