Lay-out optimisation through an integrated approach based on material flow and operations mapping using a commercial software

The overall performance of an industrial firm is significantly affected by the design of its manufacturing facility. Factory design and plant optimisation are increasingly complex and capital‐intensive. That is why factory design projects require a great deal of modelling, analysis, and program management to ensure acceptable system performance after implementation. From this point of view the material handling plays a crucial role in flexible manufacturing systems. Given the complexity of material handling system, the aim of this paper is to investigate the challenges of the development and deployment of a multi objective approach in order to provide the company with a layout that is able to optimise the available space, speed up the transfer of material between the various units of the plant and ensure a continuous flow and the closeness between units where there is an important relationship. The final goal of the optimisation is to find a production schedule that satisfies different, contradictory production and business constraints. Definitively, the main objective of the paper is to apply multi‐disciplinary approach, tools and techniques to propose an innovative theoretical methodological approach. To illustrate the efficiency and applicability of the proposed method, it is also applied into a real case in a parts manufacturing company in Italy.