Optimal Plant Layout Design for Process-focused Systems

Corresponding Author: Dr. M. Khoshnevisan

School of Accounting & Finance
Griffith University, Australia
E-mail: [email protected]
Tel (0061)7-555-28763

Sukanto Bhattacharya
School of Information Technology
Bond University, Australia

Dr. Florentin Smarandache

University of New Mexico - Gallup, USA

Abstract

In this paper we have proposed a semi-heuristic optimization algorithm for designing

optimal plant layouts in process-focused manufacturing/service facilities. Our proposed

algorithm marries the well-known CRAFT (Computerized Relative Allocation of

Facilities Technique) with the Hungarian assignment algorithm. Being a semi-heuristic

search, our algorithm is likely to be more efficient in terms of computer CPU engagement

time as it tends to converge on the global optimum faster than the traditional CRAFT

algorithm - a pure heuristic. We also present a numerical illustration of our algorithm.

 Key Words

Facilities layout planning, load matrix, CRAFT, Hungarian assignment algorithm

Introduction

The fundamental integration phase in the design of productive systems is the layout of

production facilities. A working definition of layout may be given as the arrangement of

machinery and flow of materials from one facility to another, which minimizes material-

handling costs while considering any physical restrictions on such arrangement.

Usually this layout design is either on considerations of machine-time cost and product

availability; thereby making the production system product-focused; or on considerations

of quality and flexibility; thereby making the production system process-focused.

It is natural that while product-focused systems are better off with a ‘line layout’ dictated

by available technologies and prevailing job designs, process-focused systems, which are

more concerned with job organization, opt for a ‘functional layout’. Of course, in reality

the actual facility layout often lies somewhere in between a pure line layout and a pure

functional layout format; governed by the specific demands of a particular production

plant. Since our present paper concerns only functional layout design for process-focused

systems, this is the only layout design we will discuss here.

The main goal to keep in mind is to minimize material handling costs - therefore the

departments that incur the most interdepartmental movement should be located closest to

one another. The main type of design layouts is Block diagramming, which refers to the

movement of materials in existing or proposed facility. This information is usually

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provided with a from/to chart or load summary chart, which gives the average number of

units loads moved between departments. A load-unit can be a single unit, a pallet of

material, a bin of material, or a crate of material. The next step is to design the layout by

calculating the composite movements between departments and rank them from most

movement to least movement. Composite movement refers to the back-and-forth

movement between each pair of departments. Finally, trial layouts are place on a grid that

graphically represents the relative distances between departments. This grid then

becomes the objective of optimization when determining the optimal plant layout.

We give a visual representation of the basic operational considerations in a process-

focused system schematically as follows:

Updating skills and Routing in-process Establishing the

resources required for items to the appropriate right statistical
a particular process functional areas to process control
facilitate processing mechanism

Process feedback

In designing the optimal functional layout, the fundamental question to be addressed is

that of ‘relative location of facilities’. The locations will depend on the need for one pair

of facilities to be adjacent (or physically close) to each other relative to the need for all

other pairs of facilities to be similarly adjacent (or physically close) to each other.

Locations must be allocated based on the relative gains and losses for the alternatives and

seek to minimize some indicative measure of the cost of having non-adjacent locations of

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facilities. Constraints of space prevents us from going into the details of the several

criteria used to determine the gains or losses from the relative location of facilities and

the available sequence analysis techniques for addressing the question; for which we refer

the interested reader to any standard handbook of production/operations management.

Computerized Relative Allocation of Facilities Technique (CRAFT)

CRAFT (Buffa et al., 1964) is a computerized heuristic algorithm that takes in load

matrix of interdepartmental flow and transaction costs with a representation of a block

layout as the inputs. The block layout could either be an existing layout or; for a new

facility, any arbitrary initial layout. The algorithm then computes the departmental

locations and returns an estimate of the total interaction costs for the initial layout. The

governing algorithm is designed to compute the impact on a cost measure for two-way or

three-way swapping in the location of the facilities. For each swap, the various

interaction costs are computed afresh and the load matrix and the change in cost (increase

or decrease) is noted and stored in the RAM. The algorithm proceeds this way through all

possible combinations of swaps accommodated by the software. The basic procedure is

repeated a number of times resulting in a more efficient block layout every time till such

time when no further cost reduction is possible. The final block layout is then printed out

to serve as the basis for a detailed layout template of the facilities at a later stage. Since

its formulation, more powerful versions of CRAFT have been developed but these too

follow the same, basic heuristic routine and therefore tend to be highly CPU-intensive.

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The basic computational disadvantage of a CRAFT-type technique is that one always has

got to start with an arbitrary initial solution. This means that there is no mathematical

certainty of attaining the desired optimal solution after a given number of iterations. If the

starting solution is quite close to the optimal solution by chance, then the final solution is

attained only after a few iterations. However, as there is no guarantee that the starting

solution will be close to the global optimum, the expected number of iterations required

to arrive at the final solution tend to be quite large thereby straining computing resources.

In our present paper we propose and illustrate the Modified Assignment (MASS)

algorithm as an extension to the traditional CRAFT, to enable faster convergence to the

optimal solution. This we propose to do by marrying CRAFT technique with the

Hungarian assignment algorithm. As our proposed algorithm is semi-heuristic, it is likely

to be less CPU-intensive than any traditional, purely heuristic CRAFT-type algorithm.

The Hungarian assignment algorithm

A general assignment problem may be framed as a special case of the balanced

transportation problem with availability and demand constraints summing up to unity.

Mathematically, it has the following general linear programming form:

Minimize ΣΣ CijXij

Subject to ΣXij = 1, for each i, j = 1, 2 …n .

In words, the problem may be stated as assigning each of n individuals to n jobs so that

exactly one individual is assigned to each job in such a way as to minimize the total cost.

To ensure satisfaction of the basic requirements of the assignment problem, the basic

feasible solutions of the corresponding balanced transportation problem must be integer

valued. However, any such basic feasible solution will contain (2n – 1) variables out of

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which (n – 1) variables will be zero thereby introducing a high level of degeneracy in the

solution making the usual solution technique of a transportation problem very inefficient.

This has resulted in mathematicians devising an alternative, more efficient algorithm for

solving this class of problems, which has come to be commonly known as the Hungarian

assignment algorithm. Basically, this algorithm draws from a simple theorem in linear

algebra which says that if a constant number is added to any row and/or column of the

cost matrix of an assignment-type problem, then the resulting assignment-type problem

has exactly the same set of optimal solutions as the original problem and vice versa.

Proof:
Let Ai and Bj (i, j = 1, 2 … n) be added to the ith row and/or jth column respectively of

the cost matrix. Then the revised cost elements are Cij* = Cij + Ai +Bj. The revised cost of

assignment is ΣΣCij*Xij = ΣΣ (Cij + Ai + Bj) Xij = ΣΣCijXij + ΣAi ΣXij + ΣBjΣXij. But by

the imposed assignment constraint ΣXij = 1 (for i, j = 1, 2 … n), we have the revised

cost as ΣΣCijXij + ΣAi + ΣBj i.e. the cost differs from the original by a constant. As the

revised costs differ from the originals by a constant, which is independent of the decision

variables, an optimal solution to one is also optimal solution to the other and vice versa.

This theorem can be used in two different ways to solve the assignment problem. First, if

in an assignment problem, some cost elements are negative, the problem may be

converted into an equivalent assignment problem by adding a positive constant to each of

the entries in the cost matrix so that they all become non-negative. Next, the important

thing to look for is a feasible solution that has zero assignment cost after adding suitable

constants to the rows and columns. Since it has been assumed that all entries are now

non-negative, this assignment must be the globally optimal one.

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Given a zero assignment, a straight line is drawn through it (a horizontal line in case of a

row and a vertical line in case of a column), which prevents any other assignment in that

particular row/column. The governing algorithm then seeks to find the minimum number

of such straight lines, which would cover all the zero entries to avoid any redundancy.

Let us say that k such lines are required to cover all the zeroes. Then the necessary

condition for optimality is that number of zeroes assigned is equal to k and the sufficient

condition for optimality is that k is equal to n for an n x n cost matrix.

The MASS (Modified Assignment) algorithm

The basic idea of our proposed algorithm is to develop a systematic scheme to arrive at

the initial input block layout to be fed into the CRAFT program so that the program does

not have to start off from any initial (and possibly inefficient) solution. Thus, by

subjecting the problem of finding an initial block layout to a mathematical scheme, we in

effect reduce the purely heuristic algorithm of CRAFT to a semi-heuristic one. Our

proposed MASS algorithm follows the following sequential steps:

Step 1: We formulate the load matrix such that each entry lij represents the load carried

from facility i to facility j

Step 2: We insert lij = M, where M is a large positive number, into all the vacant cells of

the load matrix signifying that no inter-facility load transportation is required or possible

between the ith and jth vacant cells

Step 3: We solve the problem on the lines of a standard assignment problem using the

Hungarian assignment algorithm treating the load matrix as the cost matrix

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Step 4: We draft the initial block layout trying to keep the inter-facility distance dij*

between the ith and jth assigned facilities to the minimum possible magnitude, subject to

the available floor area and architectural design of the shop floor

Step 5: We proceed using the CRAFT program to arrive at the optimal layout by

iteratively improving upon the starting solution provided by the Hungarian assignment

algorithm till the overall load function L = ΣΣ lijdij* subject to any particular bounds

imposed on the problem

The Hungarian assignment algorithm will ensure that the initial block layout is at least

very close to the global optimum if not globally optimal itself. Therefore the subsequent

CRAFT procedure will converge on the global optimum much faster starting from this

near-optimal initial input block layout and will be much less CPU-intensive that any

traditional CRAFT-type algorithm. Thus MASS is not a stand-alone optimization tool but

rather a rider on the traditional CRAFT that tries to ensure faster convergence to the

optimal block layout for process-focused systems, by making the search semi-heuristic.

We provide a numerical illustration of the MASS algorithm in the Appendix by

designing the optimal block layout of a small, single-storied, process-focused

manufacturing plant with six different facilities and a rectangular shop floor design. The

model can however be extended to cover bigger plants with more number of facilities.

Also the MASS approach we have advocated here can even be extended to deal with the

multi-floor version of CRAFT (Johnson, 1982) by constructing a separate assignment

table for each floor subject to any predecessor-successor relationship among the facilities.

*******

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 Appendix: Numerical illustration of MASS

We consider a small, single-storied process-focused manufacturing plant with a

rectangular shop floor plan having six different facilities. We mark these facilities as FI,

FII, FIII, FIV, FV and FVI. The architectural design requires that there be an aisle of at least

2meters width between two adjacent facilities and the total floor area of the plant is

64meters x 22meters. Based on the different types of jobs processed, the loads to be

transported between the different facilities are supplied in the following load matrix:

FI FII FIII FIV FV FVI

FI − 20 − − − 25

FII 10 − 15 − − −

FIII − − − 30 − −

FIV − − 50 − − 40

FV − − − − − 10

FVI − − − − 15 −

We put in a very large positive value M in each of the vacant cells of the load matrix to

signify that no inter-facility transfer of load is required or is permissible for these cells:

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 FI FII FIII FIV FV FVI
FI M 20 M M M 25
FII 10 M 15 M M M
FIII M M M 30 M M
FIV M M 50 M M 40
FV M M M M M 10
FVI M M M M 15 M

Next we apply the standard Hungarian assignment algorithm to obtain the initial solution:

Assignment table after first iteration:

FI FII FIII FIV FV FVI

FI M-20 0 M-25 M-20 M-20 5
FII 0 M-10 0 M-10 M-10 M-10
FIII M-30 M-30 M-35 0 M-30 M-30
FIV M-40 M-40 5 M-40 M-40 0
FV M-10 M-10 M-15 M-10 M-10 0
FVI M-15 M-15 M-20 M-15 0 M-15

There are two rows and three columns that are covered i.e. k = 5. But as this is a 6x6 load

matrix, the above solution is sub-optimal. So we make a second iteration:

FI FII FIII FIV FV FVI

FI M-20 0 M-25 M-15 M-15 10
FII 0 M-10 0 M-5 M-5 M-5
FIII M-35 M-35 M-40 0 M-30 M-30
FIV M-45 M-45 0 M-40 M-40 0
FV M-15 M-15 M-20 M-10 M-10 0
FVI M-20 M-20 M-25 M-15 0 M-15

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Now columns FI, FIII, FIV, FVI and rows FI and FVI are covered i.e. k = 6. As this is a 6x6

load matrix the above solution is optimal.

The optimal assignment table (subject to the 2meters of aisle between adjacent facilities):

FI FII FIII FIV FV FVI

FI − − − − −
*
FII − − − − −
*
FIII − − − − −
*
FIV − − − − −
*
FV − − − − −
*
FVI − − − − −
*

Initial layout of facilities as dictated by the Hungarian assignment algorithm:

FI FIII FV

FII FIV FVI

The above layout conforms to the rectangular floor plan of the plant and also places the

assigned facilities adjacent to each other with an aisle of 2 meters width between them.

Thus FI is adjacent to FII, FIII is adjacent to FIV and FV is adjacent to FVI.

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Based on the cost information provided in the load-matrix the total cost in terms of load-

units for the above layout can be calculated as follows:

L = 2{(20 + 10) + (50 + 30) + (10 + 15)} + (44 x 25) + (22 x 40) + (22 x 15) = 2580.

By feeding the above optimal solution into the CRAFT program the final, the global

optimum is found in a single iteration. The final, optimal layout as obtained by CRAFT is

as under:

FI FVI FIV

FII FV FIII

Based on the cost information provided in the load-matrix the total cost in terms of load-

units for the optimal layout can be calculated as follows:

L* = 2{(10 + 20) + (15 + 10) + (5 + 30)} + (22 x 25) + (44 x 15) + (22 x 40) = 2360.

Therefore the final solution is an improvement of just 220 load-units over the initial

solution! This shows that this initial solution fed into CRAFT is indeed near optimal and

can thus ensure a faster convergence.

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