Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis in Selection of Facility Layout Design

A manufacturing plant or service centre generally is an integrated system comprising of physical arrangement of different facilities within a spatial environment such as, equipment, machines, materials, human accommodation. So a plant may be viewed as a large number of finite geometric areas arranged on the floor space of the building. The problem of arranging these areas in an effective manner is the facility layout problem. The importance of facility layout is the efficient arrangement operation of an enterprise due to their effect in achieving an efficient product flow. In the present work, alternative multiple criteria decision making methodologies are used for selection of facility layout design selection problems. Here the PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation), multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method based on ranking procedure, is presented and it is compared with the results of the available MCDA based ones. This study proposes an approach of deriving the rank value, in order to get optimal configuration, from the average of more than one set of rank results obtained through the deployment of MCDA methodologies.