International Journal of Advanced Engineering and Technology

Authors
Prem Narayan Ahirwar, Dr. Pankaj Agarwal

Abstract
The facility layout planning plays very important role in the manufacturing process and seriously impacts a company’s profitability. An effective layout may minimize the material flows and distances between the department locations which lead to the reduction of material handling costs often improvement in cycle time. To keep up with the pace, the facility layout needs to be adaptable to changes. The layout has to be “flexible” enough to accommodate changes in product design, process design and schedule design. Optimizing facilities layout in a manufacturing plant is basically to arrange the machines in the workshop area with the best sequence to increase the performance of the factory. Researchers have found out that it is possible to reduce the manufacturing costs up to 30% by an effective arrangement of machines or departments because it was estimated that 20 to 50% of the costs are due to the handling of material or work pieces. Therefore looking into such high percentage of return, many researches had done to provide the “best layout” to the facility layout problem. It is necessary to redesign the facility layout for improvement in production processes that will accept the future changes coming in manufacturing, smooth operating and makes the profit to run the business. So forecasting and readiness has got the prime importance. This paper mainly discusses about Dynamic Facility Layout Problems (DFLP) and methods to solve the DFLP.