Facility layout design in a changing environment

Increasing global competition, rapid changes in technology and the necessity to respond quickly to a cost and quality conscious customer have changed the dynamics of facilities planning. Today's manufacturing facility needs to be responsive to the frequent changes in product mix and demand while minimizing material handling and machine relocation costs. In this paper, we present a framework for the design of a dynamic facility which can respond effectively to the changes in product design, mix and volume in a continuously evolving work environment. A genetic algorithm-based heuristic is used for solving the design problem and two test cases are presented to illustrate the use of the methodology.