Weighted Euclidean distance based approach as a multiple attribute decision making method for plant or facility layout design selection

Article history: Received 25 November 2011 Accepted 11 January 2011 Available online 15 January 2012 In response to increasing inflexible customer demands and to improve the competitive advantage, industrial organizations have to adopt strategies to achieve cost reduction, continual quality improvement, increased customer service and on-time delivery performance. Selection of the most suitable plant or facility layout design for an organization is one among the most important strategic issues to fulfill all these above-mentioned objectives. Nowadays, many industrial organizations have come to realize the importance of proper selection of the plant or facility layout design to survive in the global competitive market. Selecting the proper layout design from a given set of candidate alternatives is a difficult task, as many potential qualitative and quantitative criteria need to be considered. This paper proposes a Euclidean distance based approach (WEDBA) as a multiple attribute decision making method to deal with the complex plant or facility layout design problems of the industrial environment. Three examples are included to illustrate the approach. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved

[1]  Michael H. Hu,et al.  A solution to the unequal area facilities layout problem by genetic algorithm , 2005, Comput. Ind..

[2]  Meir J. Rosenblatt,et al.  The facilities layout problem: a multi-goal approach , 1979 .

[3]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  Ant system: optimization by a colony of cooperating agents , 1996, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B.

[4]  Tapio Westerlund,et al.  An epsilon-accurate model for optimal unequal-area block layout design , 2005, Comput. Oper. Res..

[5]  Adedeji Badiru,et al.  FLEXPERT: facility layout expert system using fuzzy linguistic relationship codes , 1996 .

[6]  É. Taillard,et al.  Adaptive memories for the Quadratic Assignment Problems , 1997 .

[7]  Marc Goetschalckx,et al.  An interactive layout heuristic based on hexagonal adjacency graphs , 1992 .

[8]  Young Hae Lee,et al.  A shape-based block layout approach to facility layout problems using hybrid genetic algorithm , 2002 .

[9]  Ching-Lai Hwang,et al.  Fuzzy Multiple Attribute Decision Making - Methods and Applications , 1992, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems.

[10]  Fakhri Karray,et al.  Tools of soft computing as applied to the problem of facilities layout planning , 2000, IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Syst..

[11]  R. Venkata Rao,et al.  Decision Making in Manufacturing Environment Using Graph Theory and Fuzzy Multiple Attribute Decision Making Methods , 2013 .

[12]  M. G. Bhatt,et al.  An alternative multiple attribute decision making methodology for solving optimal facility layout design selection problems , 2011, Comput. Ind. Eng..

[13]  B. L. Foote,et al.  DoorFAST: A constructive procedure to optimally layout a facility including aisles and door locations basedon anaisle flow distance metric , 1997 .

[14]  R. Venkata Rao,et al.  Flexible manufacturing system selection using a combinatorial mathematics-based decision-making method , 2009 .

[15]  B. Bhattacharyya,et al.  Fuzzy decision support system for manufacturing facilities layout planning , 2005, Decis. Support Syst..

[16]  Jon C. Dattorro,et al.  Convex Optimization & Euclidean Distance Geometry , 2004 .

[17]  Da Ruan,et al.  Integrating data envelopment analysis and analytic hierarchy for the facility layout design in manufacturing systems , 2006, Inf. Sci..

[18]  B. L. Foote,et al.  Automatic computation and drawing of facility layouts with logical aisle structures , 1994 .

[19]  Yun-Kung Chung,et al.  A neuro-based expert system for facility layout construction , 1999, J. Intell. Manuf..

[20]  Mustahsan Mir,et al.  A hybrid optimization approach for layout design of unequal-area facilities , 2001 .

[21]  Mª Carmen González-Cruz,et al.  An entropy-based algorithm to solve the facility layout design problem , 2011 .

[22]  B. Bhattacharyya,et al.  Facilities layout planning based on Fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making methodology , 2003 .

[23]  Ali Taghavi,et al.  A heuristic procedure for the integrated facility layout design and flow assignment problem , 2011, Comput. Ind. Eng..

[24]  Berna Haktanirlar Ulutas,et al.  A clonal selection algorithm for dynamic facility layout problems , 2009 .

[25]  Catherine M. Harmonosky,et al.  A multi-factor plant layout methodology , 1992 .

[26]  A. D. Raoot,et al.  A ‘fuzzy’ approach to facilities lay-out planning , 1991 .

[27]  Michael H. Hu,et al.  Simulated annealing based parallel genetic algorithm for facility layout problem , 2011 .

[28]  J. Gower.  Euclidean Distance Geometry , 1982 .

[29]  A. Abedian,et al.  A novel method for materials selection in mechanical design: Combination of non-linear normalization and a modified digital logic method , 2007 .

[30]  Taho Yang,et al.  Multiple-attribute decision making methods for plant layout design problem , 2007 .

[31]  D. Y. Sha,et al.  A design approach to the multi-objective facility layout problem , 1999 .

[32]  Artak Hakobyan,et al.  Heuristics for the dynamic facility layout problem with unequal-area departments , 2010, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[33]  S. Sahu,et al.  A multigoal heuristic for facilities design problems: MUGHAL , 1982 .

[34]  Taho Yang,et al.  A hierarchical AHP/DEA methodology for the facilities layout design problem , 2003, Eur. J. Oper. Res..