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2006

A continuous approach to considering uncertainty in facility design

13 years 11 months ago
A continuous approach to considering uncertainty in facility design
This paper presents a formulation of the facilities block layout problem which explicitly considers uncertainty in material handling costs on a continuous scale by use of expected values and standard deviations of product forecasts. This formulation is solved using a genetic algorithm meta-heuristic with a flexible bay construct of the departments and total facility area. It is shown that depending on the attitude of the decision-maker towards uncertainty, the optimal design can change significantly. Furthermore, designs can be optimized directly for robustness over a range of uncertainty that is pre-specified by the user. This formulation offers a computationally tractable and intuitively appealing alternative to previous stochastic layout formulations that are based on discrete scenario probabilities. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Bryan A. Norman, Alice E. Smith
Added 11 Dec 2010
Updated 11 Dec 2010
Type Journal
Year 2006
Where COR
Authors Bryan A. Norman, Alice E. Smith
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