Sadan Kulturel-Konak
Penn State
Unequal Area Facility Layout Problem- Static and Dynamic
The facility layout problem (FLP) is concerned with finding the most efficient arrangement of a set of departments within a facility. Material handling research shows that significant long term cost savings can be achieved if manufacturing facilities are designed to minimize non-value adding movements of parts and materials between departments. However, the FLP especially with unequal area departments is a very challenging problem to optimally solve. Therefore, the literature has focused on developing heuristic approaches. One of the challenges of heuristic approaches to the FLP on the continuous plane is to design a solution representation scheme that provides a consistent arrangement of departments in the facility. In this presentation, previous modelling and solution approaches for the FLP will be discussed. Then, a new encoding scheme, called the location/shape representation, on the continuous domain will be introduced both static and dynamic versions of the FLP. The proposed solution approach integrates the Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Linear Programming (LP) in a novel way. The location/shape representation enables the GA to recombine solutions discovered by LP. Thereby, the information gained by solving LP is fully integrated into the genetic search. The presentation focuses on the theoretical and practical advantages of the location/shape representation, particularly in solving the FLP with a hybridization of heuristic and exact algorithms. Promising numerical results are presented for a comprehensive set of test problems from the literature.
Sadan Kulturel-Konak is a Professor of Management Information Systems and the coordinator of Engineering Entrepreneurship at Penn State Berks. She received her degrees in Industrial Engineering; B.S. from Gazi University, Turkey in 1993, M.S. from Middle East Technical University, Turkey in 1996 and from the University of Pittsburgh in 1999, and Ph.D. from Auburn University in 2002. Her research interests are in modeling and optimization of complex systems and robustness under uncertainty with applications to facility layout, reliability, and scheduling. She has published her research in numerous journals including IIE Transactions, OR Letters, INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS Transactions on Education, International Journal of Production Research, European Journal of Operational Research, and Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing Computers. She is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE). She is currently the chair of INFORMS Transportation Science Logistics (TSL) Society- Facility Logistics Special Interest Group. She has been a principle investigator in sponsored projects from National Science Foundation (NSF) and VentureWell. sadan@psu.edu.
