The Zone-based Dynamic Facility Layout Problem (Date: 21 July 2017)

The Dynamic Facility Layout Problem (DFLP) is to decide the locations of departments in a facility where there are multiple planning periods and the interdepartmental material flows change over the planning periods.  The main challenge in the DFLP is that there are two conflicting objectives of the problem: minimizing the material handling cost and the rearrangement cost.  In addition to these two costs, we also consider the cost of changing overall structure of the layout over the planning horizon.  Therefore, we model and solve the unequal area DFLP using a zone-based structure where the dimensions of the departments are decision variables and the departments are assigned to flexible zones with a pre-structured positioning.  A zone-based block layout inherently includes aisle structures that can easily be adapted to the material handling system in use.  This is particularly important in the DFLP because the changes in a block layout from one period to the next may require structural modifications in the material handling system, which in turn may be very costly or even impossible to implement practically.  In this seminar, a novel matheuristic, which combines concepts from Simulated Annealing, Variable Neighborhood Search, and Mixed Integer Programming, to solve the formulated zone-based DFLP with promising results will be presented.