DESIGN OF A CONSTRAINED MULTI-ROWS LAYOUT IN PRESENCE OF UNCERTAINTY

This paper deals with a multi-rows layout problem where different machines need to be placed in available locations so as to minimize the material handling costs. The market demands of products are subject to uncertainty. One particularity of this problem is that machines can not be placed to any distance from each other. The proximity between machines belongs to a bounded interval and a preference relation exists on the choice of the possible values. We model the problem using fuzzy sets and propose a technique, which is based on genetic algorithms, to solve the problem. An illustrative example shows the benefits of this approach.