A GENETIC ALGORITHM FOR FACILITY LAYOUT DESIGN IN FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

The flexible manufacturing system (FMS) facility layout problem (FLP) involves the positioning of cells within a given area so as to minimiz e the material flow costs between cells. The FLP design includes speci fying the spatial coordinates of each cell, the orientation of each ce ll in either a horizontal or vertical position, and the position of ea ch cell's pickup and dropoff points. The layout design problem is both tactically and strategically important since the layout plays a large role in determining the efficiency and flexibility of the system. The FMS layout problem differs from traditional layout problems in that t here are additional constraints on a cell's shape and orientation and the location of the pickup/dropoff points must be determined. A mixed integer programming formulation for the FLP developed by Das (1993) is adapted and heuristically solved in this paper. Because of the NP-har d nature of the solution space, a genetic algorithm based decompositio n strategy is proposed and computationally tested. A comparison of the computational results with the existing methods indicates that the he uristic is a viable alternative for efficiently and effectively genera ting layout designs for flexible manufacturing systems.