Optimal algorithms for row layout problems in automated manufacturing systems.: An article from: IIE Transactions

This digital document is an article from IIE Transactions, published by Institute of Industrial Engineers, Inc. (IIE) on February 1, 1995. The length of the article is 4005 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: In many automated manufacturing environments, particularly flowlines and flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs), machines are arranged along a straight material-handling track with a material-handling device moving jobs from one machine to another. These layouts are referred to as row machine layouts. In this paper we study the row layout problem (RLP) under the design objective of minimizing the total backtracking distance of the material-handling device, which is an NP-complete problem. We propose the use of a dynamic programming algorithm for its solution. A special case of the problem, usually encountered in flexible manufacturing cells and which can be solved with a polynomial procedure, is also discussed. For the equidistance case (i.e., successive candidate locations are in equal distances), we formulate the problem as an integer linear program. The use of standard mathematical programming codes can efficiently solve this formulation.

Citation Details
Title: Optimal algorithms for row layout problems in automated manufacturing systems.
Author: Panagiotis Kouvelis
Publication:IIE Transactions (Refereed)
Date: February 1, 1995
Publisher: Institute of Industrial Engineers, Inc. (IIE)
Volume: v27 Issue: n1 Page: p99(6)

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