Significant improvements in production effectiveness have resulted from
implementing cellular manufacturing systems (CMS). Following the cell formation, an
important issue that needs to be addressed is the unequal cell (or department/facility)
layout problem, which is the sub-issue in the CF problem. The work reported in this
thesis illustrates the assignment of unequal cell locations in dealing with the known
traffic movements on a shop floor. In addition, this research addresses the impact of the
geometry or shape of the department as an important design factor in the unequal area
facility layout problem, an issue that has not been addressed by the previous researchers.
The problem is formulated as a mixed-binary non-linear programming model and
is proven to be NP-hard in the strong sense. Due to its computational complexity, a
higher-level heuristic, based on a concept known as tabu-search, is proposed to efficiently
solve the problem. Six different versions of the tabu search-based heuristic algorithm are
tested on three different problem structures.
The results obtained from performing the experiment concluded that the tabu
search-based heuristic using short-term memory and variable tabu-list sizes is preferred
over other heuristics as the problem size increases. The performance comparison between
the current and the previous research shows that the solution obtained for the well-known
problems in this research are better than that obtained in the past. / Graduation date: 2002
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/32283 |
| Date | 16 November 2001 |
| Creators | Kriausakul, Thanat |
| Contributors | Logendran, Rasaratnam |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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