Chapter 6
Engineering Applications of Facility
Layout
This chapter gathers a variety of examples to illustrate the range of applications of
facility layout. The main areas represented are manufacturing and hospital layout.
This selection of examples is intended to give insight into the data that might need
to be gathered and to illustrate that real data is not always available in a clear format.
Some processing may need to be carried out before the data is ready for use with
the mathematical optimization model.
We include applications for the various types of layout problems presented in the
previous chapters. Specifically, we present applications for row layout, single-floor
layout, multi-floor layout, dynamic layout, and the QAP. In some cases the nature of
the layout problem is specified, and in others we leave it to the reader to determine
how the structure of the problem and the data provided may be used to develop a
suitable model.
The sources of these applications are given in Sect. 6.10, and we refer the
interested reader to the references for more information about the examples.
6.1 Metallurgical Application
This first simple example is interesting because it comes from a master’s thesis
carried out in the context of a company more than 55 years ago, when computing
power was limited to an extent that is now difficult to imagine. It illustrates the
calculations and simplifications that had to be made to solve layout instances at that
time. Despite the simplification, these instances were still useful in practice.
A metallurgical manufacturer needs to build a new plant in which all the
departments (listed in Table 6.1) must be of equal size. The volume of parts to be
handled, the capacity of the handling vehicles, and the sequence of departments that
will handle each part are described in Table 6.2. For the distances between locations,
we assume a 3 × 3 floor where each cell is a unit square.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. F. Anjos, M. V. C. Vieira, Facility Layout, EURO Advanced Tutorials
on Operational Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70990-7_6
89
Engineering Applications of Facility
Layout
This chapter gathers a variety of examples to illustrate the range of applications of
facility layout. The main areas represented are manufacturing and hospital layout.
This selection of examples is intended to give insight into the data that might need
to be gathered and to illustrate that real data is not always available in a clear format.
Some processing may need to be carried out before the data is ready for use with
the mathematical optimization model.
We include applications for the various types of layout problems presented in the
previous chapters. Specifically, we present applications for row layout, single-floor
layout, multi-floor layout, dynamic layout, and the QAP. In some cases the nature of
the layout problem is specified, and in others we leave it to the reader to determine
how the structure of the problem and the data provided may be used to develop a
suitable model.
The sources of these applications are given in Sect. 6.10, and we refer the
interested reader to the references for more information about the examples.
6.1 Metallurgical Application
This first simple example is interesting because it comes from a master’s thesis
carried out in the context of a company more than 55 years ago, when computing
power was limited to an extent that is now difficult to imagine. It illustrates the
calculations and simplifications that had to be made to solve layout instances at that
time. Despite the simplification, these instances were still useful in practice.
A metallurgical manufacturer needs to build a new plant in which all the
departments (listed in Table 6.1) must be of equal size. The volume of parts to be
handled, the capacity of the handling vehicles, and the sequence of departments that
will handle each part are described in Table 6.2. For the distances between locations,
we assume a 3 × 3 floor where each cell is a unit square.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. F. Anjos, M. V. C. Vieira, Facility Layout, EURO Advanced Tutorials
on Operational Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70990-7_6
89