Facility layout design in a changing environment

Increasing global competition, rapid changes in technology and the necessit y to respond quickly to a cost and quality conscious customer have changed the dynamics of facilities planning. Today's manufacturing facility needs t o be responsive to the frequent changes in product mix and demand while min imizing material handling and machine relocation costs. In this paper, we p resent a framework for the design of a dynamic facility which can respond e ffectively to the changes in product design, mix and volume in a continuous ly evolving work environment. A genetic algorithm-based heuristic is used f or solving the design problem and two test cases are presented to illustrat e the use of the methodology.