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Designing the Material Transport Network on Unequal Area Facility Layout Design by Considering Empty Flows and a Compact Cerntroid-to-Centroid Network

Khalilzadeh, Fatemeh | 2024

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 57638 (01)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Industrial Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Radman, Maryam; Asef Vaziri, Ardavan
  7. Abstract:
  8. The material handling cost is a significant portion of the operational costs in a production system. Designing an efficient material transport network helps reduce these costs. In most unequal-area facility layout models, the total loaded trip distances are minimized, and the empty flows are overlooked. In these models, it is assumed that the transportation of load is possible through bidirectional rectilinear paths connecting pairs of departments, and the optimal location of departments is determined based on the rectilinear centroid-to-centroid distances. These assumptions lead to a complex network with a large number of edges, which is impractical to implement in reality. In this study, a bidirectional material transport network is designed considering the centroids of departments as the pick-up/drop-off stations. Furthermore, the impact of the empty flows is examined under two different dispatching policies. Due to the complexity of the resulting networks, different approaches are proposed to make the networks less congested. Mathematical modeling is used to design the networks. The proposed models are implemented on three standard instances consisting of 10, 20, and 30 departments. The results indicate that considering empty flows in the modeling phase for the three examined instances can lead to up to a 86% change in material handling costs. Additionally, the policy for dispatching empty vehicles plays a significant role in material handling costs and network length. The ratio of material handling costs under the FCFS policy to the STDF policy can be up to 1.81, and the ratio of the length of the network can be up to 1.49. Using the proposed models to simplify the networks for the three examined instances can result in an average reduction of up to 29.5% in material handling costs and up to 31.5% in networks length
  9. Keywords:
  10. Facility Layout ; Unequal Area ; Material Handling Cost ; Unequal Area-Facility Layout Problem (UA-FLP) ; Material Transport Network

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