Integrated facility layout and scheduling

The Facility Layout Planning (FLP) is to find the most efficient one-to-one mapping between facilities and locations on the factory floor in order to optimize one or more manufacturing objectives. A facility in this context is a physical entity in the manufacturing system used for facilitating the processing of a particular task, and can include a machine tool, a department, a work center, a manufacturing cell, or a warehouse. Layout planning in a manufacturing company is an important economical consideration. A proper layout will help any company improve its business performance and can reduce up to 50 % of total operating expenses.

Scheduling exists almost everywhere in practical manufacturing situations and is one of the most challenging optimization problems. It can be classified into four main categories for manufacturing settings: (i) single-machine scheduling, (ii) flow-shop scheduling, (iii) job-shop scheduling, and (iv) open-shop scheduling. The job-shop scheduling problem is the determination of the sequencing of jobs on several machines following a specified processing sequence for each job such that one or more performance measures are optimized subject to some constraints.

This project integrates a dynamic FLP and job-shop scheduling problems for rapidaly evolving manufacturing environments. The project proposes a hybridized non-dominated sorting genetic and local search method to solve large sized-instances of the problem.