Physical layout with minimization of the transport costs
Résumé
A hybrid method for solving a particular physical layout problem with transportation cost minimization (investment and utilization) is presented. The available material handling consists of carts, gantries and at most, one sliding bridge. These transport products or parts between cells. Cells are placed in a facility whose space may contain obstacles (small walls, pillars, ...). Cells are linked by distance constraints. There are also constraints concerned with the utilization of the material handling systems. For solving this problem, we propose a new decomposition-based approximation method mixing three known approaches: Among these methods, simulated annealing deals with the geometrical aspect of the problem (i.e.cell location avoiding overlapping). Genetic algorithm or simulated annealing makes decisions about the MHS choices (i.e. investment costs and capacities). The exact method (the Hitchcock method for the transportation problem) minimizes the total MHS utilization costs. Industrial applications are numerous. Our hypotheses are general and apply to many situations.