Computer-Aided Facility Design Revisited: A Prototype Design Workstation for AGV Systems

In the mid-sixties, there was great hope that computers would revolutionize facility design. Research focused on facility layout and resulted in a number of computer programs for the block layout problem. Sadly, in the intervening twenty years, while computers have become prominent in facility design, facility design research has failed to produce a significant impact on the practice of facility design. Perhaps the reason is that the research has focused on the wrong issues. This chapter describes a strategy for computer-aided facility design, and describes the current state of a prototype design workstation developed from that strategy.

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