A multicriteria approach for material yard planning

The material yard is the origin of the production process for manufacturing firms. If materials are not stored at appropriate locations of the yard, then the stacking operation and the subsequent reclaiming operation will be inefficient in terms of time. In this paper a multicriteria approach which utilizes local trade-offs between different criteria in the absence of an explicit overall preference function is proposed to solve the material yard planning problem. The idea is to linearize the unknown preference function at a given point in the solution space. If the trade-offs between different criteria at this point can be determined via some mechanism, then a better solution can be derived. This process is continued until it converges to a stationary point, namely the optimal solution. To illustrate this idea, a case of the China Steel Co. in Taiwan is presented. The results from a simulation study indicate that the proposed approach is able to find a very good solution which satisfies all the criteria in a rather short transition period.