A solution to the unequal area facilities layout problem by genetic algorithm

The majority of the issued facilities layout problems (FLPs) minimize the material handling cost and ignore other factors, such as area utilization, department shape and site shape size. These factors, however, might influence greatly the objective function and should give consideration. The research range of this paper is focus on the unequal areas department facilities layout problem, and implement analysis of variance (ANOVA) of statistics to find out the best site size of layout by genetic algorithm. The proposed module takes the minimum total layout cost (TLC) into account. TLC is an objective function combining material flow factor cost (MFFC), shape ratio factor (SRF) and area utilization factor (AUF). In addition, a rule-based of expert system is implemented to create space-filling curve for connecting each unequal area department to be continuously placed without disjoint (partition). In this manner, there is no gap between each unequal area department. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is more feasible in dealing with the facilities layout problems in the real world. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.