Interactive microcomputer graphic methods for smoothing craft layouts

Computer-aided layout planning has been under development since the early 1960s, and many layout programs are based on the powerful and well known program, CRAFT (Computerized Relative Allocation of Facilities Technique by Armour and Buffa 1963).

Unfortunately, the major drawback of these facilities layout programs is that they often create unrealistic and impractical designs since the resulting block layouts can have odd shapes. Most architectural building designs require that the rooms and departments be in the form of squares, rectangles or L-shapes. The traditional approach to rectifying this problem is to manually modify the block plans at the corresponding expense of time and effort.

This paper identifies the problems and proposes interactive graphic methods for smoothing CRAFT layouts. In addition, a new method for the assessment of layout efficiency is introduced to measure the quality of a layout before and after smoothing.