Multi-criteria Evaluation for Facility Layout Problems

The static facility layout problem is mostly based on conventional QAP(Quadratic assignment problem) model,which only considers the material handling cost and the relocation cost.But in practice,minimizing work-in-progress(WIP) inventories and waiting time is cornerstones of popular manufacturing strategies such as lean,JIT manufacturing.This paper presented an analytical model which considers materials handling cost and queuing performance measures such as WIP inventory in the objective function of layout problem.The simulation study of an example system shows that the analytical results are consistent with the simulation outputs.