Layout design for flexible manufacturing systems considering single-loop directional flow patterns

To achieve high productivity in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS), an efficient layout arrangement and material flow path design are important due to the large percentage of product cost that is related to material handling. The layout design problem addressed in this paper has departments with fixed shapes and pick-up/drop-off points. It is an open-field type layout with single-loop directed flow path. A two-step heuristic is proposed to solve the problem. It first solves a traditional block layout with directed-loop flow path to minimize material handling costs by using a combined space filling curve and simulated annealing algorithm. The second step of the proposed methodology uses the resulting flow sequence and relative positioning information from the first step as input to solve the detailed FMS layout, which includes the spatial coordinates and orientation of each FMS cell. This detailed FMS layout problem is formulated and solved as a mixed integer program. Empirical illustrations show promising results for the proposed methodology in solving real-world type problems.