Title: The Zone-based Dynamic Facility Layout Problem with Input/Output (I/O) Points

Abstract:

The dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) is to decide the locations of the departments in a facility over multiple planning periods. The main challenge in the DFLP is that there are two conflicting objectives of the problem: minimizing the material handling cost and the rearrangement cost. The cost of changing the structure of the layout over the planning horizon is also considered. Therefore, we model and solve the unequal area zone-based DFLP (ZDFLP) where the dimensions of the departments are decision variables and the departments are assigned to flexible zones with a pre-structured positioning. A zone-based block layout inherently includes possible aisle structures which can easily be adapted to the material handling system in use. This is particularly important in the DFLP because the changes in a block layout may require structural modifications in the material handling system, which in turn may be very costly. The proposed approach also considers determining relative department locations, their dimensions, as well as input/output (I/O) points concurrently for the first time in the literature. A new matheuristic, which combines concepts from simulated annealing, variable neighborhood search, and mixed-integer programming, is used to solve the ZDFLP with promising results.

Sadan Kulturel‐Konak is a Professor of Management Information Systems and the Director of Flemming Creativity, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CEED) Center at Penn State Berks.  She received her Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Auburn University.  Her research interests are in modeling and optimization of complex systems and robustness under uncertainty with applications to facility layout, reliability, and scheduling.  She has published her research in numerous journals including IIE Transactions, OR Letters, INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS Transactions on Education, International Journal of Production Research, European Journal of Operational Research, and Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing Computers.  She is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).  She is the past chairs of the Women in OR/MS (WORMS), INFORMS- Facility Logistics Special Interest Group and ASEE Middle Atlantic Section.  She has been a principal investigator in sponsored projects from National Science Foundation (NSF) and VentureWell.  sadan@psu.edu.