Designing a Program using Matlab to Improve Industrial Facility Layout
Abstract
The facility layout design affects directly on reducing the total cost (TC) and raising the efficiency of this facility.Previous local studies on improving layouts were limited to improving the layout of construction sites in addition to proposing a tool to evaluate sustainable practices in these sites in Syria, so in this research, another part of the improvement processes has been studied to include the internal layouts of industrial facilities.
Due to the complex nature of facility layout, it was necessary to develop a methodology capable of overcoming some of the shortcomings of the current traditional and manual layout methods to obtain faster and more efficient tools in layout.
So the idea of this research has been appeared to provide an auxiliary program for improving the internal layout of facilities- new or previously existing – and find the optimal layout for them at the lowest possible cost for handling materials between the departments. The research has been carried out during the years 2022-2024 in Lattakia University.
one of the most appropriate facility layout methodologies(CRAFT) -Computerized Relative Allocation of Facilities Technique- has been chosen and combined with the Hungarian algorithm.Then, the proposed methodology has been programmed using MATLAB.
The designed program has been used to improve several models of facilities layouts.The results showed that the proposed methodology and the designed program achieve good efficiency in evaluating the layouts and reducing their internal transportation costs, where the program determines whether the studied layout is the optimal layout, or the program can improve it and find a layout with a lower cost. Also, the designed program provides accuracy in operations, speed in solutions and clarity in detailed data.
Based on previous studies, a list of criteria has been proposed to evaluate facility layout methodologies and then used to evaluate previous methodologies and compare them with the methodology of this research. It has been found that the methodology of this research achieves a good evaluation according to these criteria.