Row Based Layout Design of Medium Size Flexible Manufacturing Systems

The layout of a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) involves distributing different resources in the given FMS and achieving maximum efficiency of the services offered. With this in mind FMSs are designed to optimize production flow from the first stages as raw material to the finished product. Layout problems are known to be complex and are generally NP (non polynomial) hard. The problems of NP are not easily solvable within the deterministic time. The arrangement of workstations determines how long the materials have to travel and the associated material handling cost. Various heuristics and metaheuristics are used to solve NP hard problems. Out of these Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) are found to be effective metaheuristics to solve layout problems. Since the metaheuristics give a near optimal solution but not an accurate solution, for a large solution space, a single heuristic solution may not be appropriate especially when the number of workstations is large. Hence it is always important to obtain a solution for a layout problem by more than one technique like Genetic Algorithm, Ant Colony Algorithm. The objective of the present study is to find out the optimum FMS layout which yields minimum total transportation cost, by using Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO).