Layout design problems with heterogeneous area constraints

- We propose a new model to solve the layout design problem with flexible and fixed departments.
- These heterogeneous departments significantly increase problem complexity.
- Fine grained tangential support for area constraints is sometimes required.

The facility layout problem (FLP) is one of the design problems involving the assignment of facilities (e.g., machines, departments) to planar region (e.g., a plant), so as to achieve the objectives such as to minimize the cost of projected interaction between facilities or to maximize the closeness rating, etc. In this study, we deal with one of the FLP models that minimize the material handling cost between rectangular departments. Each department has an area restriction that specifies the total area that it must occupy while the specific lengths and widths are determined by the model. However, some department do not have flexibility and the dimension are predetermined. Thus, we proposed the to solve the layout design problem with two types of department. We call these constraints heterogeneous area constraints. The type A department, flexible length and width, and type B department, fixed length and width, are assigned to given floor space. Using a well-known data set which has been previously used by many other researchers, and modified version of the data aimed at testing our model, we show that the proposed model properly generates layout design for these two types of departments.

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