Manufacturing Layout
Dr Christian Hicks, Department of MMM
Engineering,
Stephenson Building, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle NE1 7RU.
|
 |
Research in manufacturing layout has focused on the development of improved
layouts, particularly for make to order and engineer to order companies.
A number of methods of analysing layouts have been developed.
-
Simulation tools for quantitatively evaluating the "quality" of material
flow in terms of a range of performance criteria
-
The application of clustering strategies to identify candidates for Cellular
Manufacturing. These have included matrix based methods such as Rank Order
Clustering (King 1980) and the Close Neighbour
method (Boe and Cheng 1991). A wide range of agglomeritive
clustering methods (Lance and Williams 1967) based
upon similarity coefficients have also been explored.
Layout generation methods using simulated annealing have also been developed
which have been found to generate "good" solutions. It is hoped that other
optimisation such as Genetic Algorithms or Taboo search will be applied
in the future.
Chris Hicks Home Page
© Dr Christian Hicks, Department of Mechanical, Materials
and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Newcastle upon Tyne