GA Based Soft Computing Approach for Open-Field Detail Layout Design

Any organization, whether it may be a manufacturing, chemical, process, construction site or an office needs to organize their physical goods within their available space to achieve certain objectives. In manufacturing perspective each facility (department, cell or machine) that needs to be placed in two dimensional shop floor region to achieve the distance based cost objective that is called facility layout problem (FLP). Minimizing the material handling cost is the most considered objective, but qualitative as well as quantitative objectives are also considered together to solve FLP. In this work the detail layout design of FLP that comprises layout design of departments within the shop floor, locations of input and output (I/O) stations and the material transport path that connects the I/O stations of departments along the department perimeter. Solving these issues simultaneously in an integrated manner will yield a near optimal solution for FLP. Due to NP-hard nature of the integrated FLP traditional approaches becomes much less useful and therefore an Elitist Strategy Genetic Algorithm (ESGA) is developed and tested with the test problem instances available in the literature.