Integrated material flow and layout in facilities design

This research applies techniques for Material Handling Flow Path and Integrated Flow Path-Layout Design for manufacturing facilities. An improved Fixed-Charge Adjustment Heuristic (FCAH) is applied to flow path design with penalties for changes in flow direction (called corner penalties). The results of this application are compared with optimal results using a Branch and Bound algorithm, and with FCAH solutions involving no corner penalties. Corner penalties are shown as effective in eliminating the zig-zagging (or staircasing) effect when using a rectilinear aisle design. A Simulated Annealing Heuristic (SAH) approach for layout is integrated with the FCAH approach for flow path to find approximate solutions to the integrated flow path-layout problem. In the integrated approach, two variations to the problem are considered where the flow output and input (pick-up and drop-off) points of departments/cells are either pre-determined, or determined automatically by another variation of the flow path design problem, once the departments have been placed.