Chapter 1
Motivation
A facility, in the general sense, is a building where people come together for a
specific purpose (Heragu 2008). Activities taking place in a facility normally also
require the presence and use of various items of equipment (furniture, machines,
materials, etc.). A well-managed facility is a means to achieve higher productivity.
This motivates interest in identifying and implementing optimal decisions for
locating, designing, and building facilities.
This book is concerned with mathematical optimization approaches for facility
layout, which is one of the fundamental aspects of facility design. Facility layout
refers to the physical arrangement of the space inside the facility. A facility may be
part or all of a building, an outdoor space, a warehouse, an office building, etc. To
apply an optimization approach, we begin by defining a number of departments.
Examples of departments are offices, cafeterias, classrooms, and manufacturing
workstations. Departments generally contain equipment; we consider the need for
floorspace to be “equipment,” so departments include functional spaces such as
corridors and elevators.
According to its function and the equipment it contains, each department has
a specified area requirement (the space needed for the equipment to be placed and
used effectively), and the area has a shape requirement (or limits on the dimensions).
While departments such as cafeterias and offices can be shaped flexibly provided the
total area requirement is met, corridors and elevators have fairly fixed dimensions.
Once we have a list of departments with the corresponding area and shape
requirements, the facility layout problem is to assign each department to a specific
location and, in the case of a flexible department, to determine its shape. Note that
the facility itself will have a fixed total area and generally fixed dimensions, and
the assignment must respect these requirements as well. The typical objective is to
minimize the total distance travelled by people and materials between departments,
in order to maximize the efficiency of the operations in the facility. This distance
can be calculated using information about the range and frequency of the activities
that will be carried out: Simmons (1969) argues that from a functional point
© 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_1
1
Motivation
A facility, in the general sense, is a building where people come together for a
specific purpose (Heragu 2008). Activities taking place in a facility normally also
require the presence and use of various items of equipment (furniture, machines,
materials, etc.). A well-managed facility is a means to achieve higher productivity.
This motivates interest in identifying and implementing optimal decisions for
locating, designing, and building facilities.
This book is concerned with mathematical optimization approaches for facility
layout, which is one of the fundamental aspects of facility design. Facility layout
refers to the physical arrangement of the space inside the facility. A facility may be
part or all of a building, an outdoor space, a warehouse, an office building, etc. To
apply an optimization approach, we begin by defining a number of departments.
Examples of departments are offices, cafeterias, classrooms, and manufacturing
workstations. Departments generally contain equipment; we consider the need for
floorspace to be “equipment,” so departments include functional spaces such as
corridors and elevators.
According to its function and the equipment it contains, each department has
a specified area requirement (the space needed for the equipment to be placed and
used effectively), and the area has a shape requirement (or limits on the dimensions).
While departments such as cafeterias and offices can be shaped flexibly provided the
total area requirement is met, corridors and elevators have fairly fixed dimensions.
Once we have a list of departments with the corresponding area and shape
requirements, the facility layout problem is to assign each department to a specific
location and, in the case of a flexible department, to determine its shape. Note that
the facility itself will have a fixed total area and generally fixed dimensions, and
the assignment must respect these requirements as well. The typical objective is to
minimize the total distance travelled by people and materials between departments,
in order to maximize the efficiency of the operations in the facility. This distance
can be calculated using information about the range and frequency of the activities
that will be carried out: Simmons (1969) argues that from a functional point
© 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_1
1