An improved facility layout construction method

This study presents a new distance-based facility layout construction technique. Given a two-dimensional (i.e. single-floor) facility layout construction problem in which the order of placement of individual departments is known (a challenging problem in itself), the technique presented herein proposes the use of sub-departments and expected distance functions instead of centroid-to-centroid distances for the placement of departments. In this paper an expected distance function is defined as the probabilistic expectation of the particular distance metric of interest (rectilinear, Euclidean, etc.) in which the parameters involved are defined by random vectors in 2-dimensional Euclidean space. This study presents an enhanced facility layout construction technique that incorporates several enhancements over the well-known systematic layout procedure (SLP). The goal herein is to minimise the error induced by the use of the centroid-to-centroid distances between the departments inherent to the SLP.