الفهرس 
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Abstract
The area of facilities’ layout contains a mix of specialized models. In addition, it requires human experience and subjective judgment in the decision process. Due to the unique requirements of individual situations, each solution procedure is applicable to a particular problem scenario. The prime objective of this study is to trace the progressive changes that have occurred over the years in the techniques, the concepts, and the models related to the facility layout problem in the manufacturing domain. An additional aim is to evolve a concept for the design of a decision support system capable of handling the qualitative and the quantitative criteria that affects the relati ve location of facilities. This work presents a comprehensive review of literature on facilities’ layout; the main features that affects the classification of the facilities’ layout problems; a chronological evolution of solution techniques; and a comparison between thirty seven selected solution procedures for seven of the major solution techniques. The base of the comparison is the general characteristic of each procedure; the inputs required; the type of output; and the limitations. The emphasis of this work is on the inter-cell layout problem, Which is a phase of the cellular manufacturing design, and is an important step before the design of the finalized layout. The inter-cell layout seeks the best arrangement of cells based on their inter-relationships within the available area. This work presents a new thought of the layout problem. It is not presented as a planning problem. It is presented as a multicriteria, multiobjective problem with a scope of handling the multi criteria aspect that affects the idealized relative location of cells within a floor plan. The problem considered is an inter-cell layout problem, the planning time is short (static case), only one floor is considered. The problem is affected by multiple criteria and has multiple objectives. The relationship between variables is presented by a quadratic model.A knowledge-based decision support system is developed to handll criteria that affect the problem. The system works in a tandem mod rule-based module with an optimization algorithm module.
The rule-based module, constructed around the object oriented ”LEVEL5 OBJECT’, enables the end-user to assign different prior This module generates a layout based on a set of rules. The re seeded optionally to the improvement algorithm to find a better c the solution.
The improvement algorithm module is an external program language, it is initiated from within the rule-based module. The pro~ recent global optimization algorithm; the simulated annealing (~ exchanging the locations of departments randomly, the exchan~ according to the two-way exchange procedure, which have beel literature to outperform the tree-way exchange procedure in the CF comparably inferior quality solution is overcomed due to the use I annealing algorithm.
The verification process is carried out by consulting the syster number of times using different boundary conditions. Res consultations showed good quality solutions, intuitively correct, v them with the layout requirements. Also, savings in computatic detected obviously for 5-cell to 8-cell problems. For larger problen is slightly higher than that for other algorithm, this is due to 1 algorithm. As a global optimization algorithm, the simulated annei the program 28*100* N times, where N is the number of cells to be relationship between the number of cells to be allocated, and the : the SA recycles justifies the comparatively high CPU time (95.04 s cell problem), in the case of larger problems.