An Improved Method For Slp - Research And Practice

Facility layout problem research is so appealing that it leads to the continuous research by academic and industrial professors. It's usually necessary to determine the layout proposals in a short interval, especially to those enterprises with layout problems. While the enterprise gains benefits like improved material flow and more efficient space utilization, at the same time, they bear the costs like implementation costs, labor costs and direct production lost costs caused by shut down or moving. It's so important to find the scientific method to solve the layout problem since the improvement of layout is often very eXpensive.An improved SLP algorithm is developed to design the plant layout in this article.Firstly, it's briefly described in this article regarding the SLP and research on facility layout both domestically and globally. The traditional SLP method is improved and a set of chart is designed to evaluate the activities relationships between pairs of departments based on the basic input of product, quantity, route, service and time. By weighting the three different factors below, it's finally possible to address the importance of relationships between the adjacent departments. The three factors are1). Contribution to business revenues of each type of products2). Inter-department material flow and handling per one-year forecast3). Activities relationship chartSecondly, in this article, the fiXed entrance and eXit in a rectangle shaped shop area are dealt with as two visual departments. They were analyzed in the from-to chart and the activities relationship chart. By locating the entrance and closest department to the entrance, all the other departments were located by selecting the most adjacent departments with highest closing relationships.Finally, the whole rectangle shaped shop area was divided into grids, and eachdepartment space was calculated as the numbers of grids. It's easily to locate the department with required grids manually.Shop layout design problem is a NP-complete or NP-hard problem. Due to the different limitations and initial layout, it's proposed to find an improved heuristic algorithm based on the SLP, which can address the layout alternatives very quickly without using specific software. Hopefully the above manual process could help to solve layout problems and to be a good reference.