Plant Layout Optimization Considering the Effect of Maintenance

With increasing production costs and constraints, demand has increased for manufacturers to minimize maintenance cost and product transport time. We address some aspects of this problem by examining how to choose the optimal layout of stations (machines or buffers) in a production facility based on how the station layout affects the maintenance and product transport times. Specifically, we consider how the location of the stations relative to the maintenance facility affects the overall maintenance time as well as how the location of the final station affects the product transport time. Hence, we can address maintenance cost during the design-phase of a production facility. By employing discrete-design optimization techniques, we generate and evaluate various station layouts to choose an optimal layout which satisfies all geometric and adjacency constraints. We focus on a single, serial production line including a set of n stations.