Abstract

A well designed facility layout consists of an adequate arrangement of departments and an efficient material handling system that minimizes the total material handling cost between departments. Block layout design and input and output (I/O) points location are the two major decisions in that need to be made when designing the layout of a facility. Although both decisions are interrelated, the classical approach to facility layout design is to consider them independently. In this thesis, an integrated approach to design the block layout and to locate the I/O points is presented. In particular, we consider three different cases: (i) block layout design with fixed I/O points, (ii) block layout design with flexible I/O points, and (iii) block layout design with flexible department shapes and flexible I/O points. Four mixed integer programming (MIP) formulations are presented for these facility layout problems, with the objective of minimizing the total material handling cost. A case study of a manufacturing company is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed models. A comparison is performed between the existing and proposed layouts. These proposed layouts provide estimated savings of 50% and more as compared with the existing layout.