AUTOMATIC FACTORY LAYOUT CONSIDERING AISLES AND DIMENSION CONSTRAINTS
The cut tree approach of Montreuil and Ratliff [1, 3, 12] is used to automatically draw a facility layout with aisles. The department arrangement can either minimize the rectilinear distance criterion or an aisle distance criterion. The aisles distance is measured by the door to door distance between departments. An eigenvector and cut tree approaches are implemented via branch and bound by Kim et al. [2], Tillinghast [10] and both heuristics are compared to CRAFT [4]. The proposed approach is based on the branch and bound technique, and in theory it will provide the optimal solution. If the runs are time and/or node limited, the proposed method is a strong heuristic. The technique is made further practical by the fact that the solution is constrained such that the rectangular shape dimensions length(l) and width(w) are fixed and a perfect fit is generated if a fit is possible