SCATTER SEARCH ALGORITHM FOR SINGLE ROW LAYOUT PROBLEM IN FMS

Flexible manufacturing Systems are automated manufacturing systems which have job shop flexibility and flow shop efficiency. One of the major concerns in Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is the minimization of the total flow of material through the system. Facility layout design deals with the arrangement of machines, in order to minimise the total flow of parts in the system. The commonly used layout configuration in FMS is the single row layout, because it provides better control of operations and has ability to support different type of material handling system such as conveyors, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV). Due to the computational complexity involved in facility layout problem, researchers have developed several heuristics to solve the problem. In this paper, Scatter Search (SS) technique is proposed to solve single row unequal area facility layout problem. The validity of the proposed approach is tested on benchmark problems available in the literature and the results are presented.

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