Multi-purpose system for plant layout design

This paper develops a computer system for the production of plant layout design. The system includes three major components. One component builds the relationships between the production departments. The criteria considered in creating these relationships include: production volume, material flow, product design, and processing operations.Another component of the system uses the departmental relationships to produce three unique design alternatives, each of which is generated by different techniques. The approaches used by the system to arrange the layout are heuristic in nature. The arrangement routines are included in the system in order to develop initial layout arrangement. The methods used in these routines can be, either allocating the most important department in the median, or the physical middle; or using the idea of the “minimal spanning tree” technique. An exchange algorithm uses the steepest-descent pairwise interchange procedure to improve the initial layout designs.A third component evaluates each of the suggested designs with respect to manufacturing the product. Each design is analyzed, and the bottlenecks in the design are indicated. The software is formulated so that it can be used to initiate a new layout design, or to analyze an existing layout.