Article ID: | iaor19951206 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 33 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 183 |
End Page Number: | 203 |
Publication Date: | Jan 1995 |
Journal: | International Journal of Production Research |
Authors: | Banerjee P., Zhou Y. |
Keywords: | layout |
Here the authors formulate the facilities layout design optimization problem for a single loop material flow path configuration. Because of the NP-hard nature of the overall search space, they employ a genetic approach to sample the decomposed search spaces. In addition the authors analyse the following features of the problem: (1) they estimate lower bounds for the unidirectional flow problem along the loop by analysing the bidirectional flow problem; (2) the authors intelligently sample the search space by designing a knowledge-augmented genetic operator for layout cases with very low flow path dominance because the regular genetic search does not perform very well in such cases; and (3) they exploit qualitative constraints for reducing travel distances in highly circuitous flow paths.