International Journal of Research in Advanced Technology IJORAT

Vol 1, Issue 9, NOVEMBER 2016

A GENETIC ALGORITHM BASED

OPTIMIZATION APPROACH FOR
FIXED SIZE DEPARTMENTS
I. Jerin Leno1, F.X.Aruno Xavier2, D.Dinesh Kumar3
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Francis Xavier Engineering College, Tirunelveli, Taminadu, India1,2,3
Abstract. In traditional layout design philosophy the inter-cell layout and flow path layout design of
material handling system (MHS) was carried out step by step in a sequential manner. This results in suboptimal solutions for FLP. In this paper an integrated approach is adopted to design the inter-cell layout
and the flow path layout of MHS simultaneously. The quality of the final layout is evaluated by
minimizing the weighted sum of two distance based cost objectives namely, 1. Total material handling
cost (TMHC) 2. Distance weighted cost of Total closeness rating score (TCRS). Sequence-pair (SP)
representation is used for layout encoding. Genetic algorithm GA is developed for the optimization
purpose.
Keywords Facility Layout design, Optimization, Genetic Algorithm.
1. INTRODUCTION
Cellular Manufacturing (CM) combines the
advantages of the flexibility of a job shop with the
efficiency of a flow shop and is considered as one
of the most promising manufacturing modes. A
good CM layout can yield a longer time benefit. A
poor layout may degrade its overall efficiency of
production systems leads to increase in WIP, poor
setups, longer queues and overloading of material
handling systems [1]. To achieve all these benefits
out of cellular manufacturing system (CMS),
proper planning of the layout for a CMS plays an
absolutely essential role in the implementation of a
CMS. In general, the full layout design for a CMS
requires four major steps [2]: (1) Cell formation,
i.e., to group parts into part families and machines
to machine cells; (2) Cell layout (intra-cell layout),
i.e., to assign machines or work stations within
each cell; (3) Cell system layout (inter-cell layout),
i.e., to arrange cells within floor; (4) material
handling (MH) system, i.e., to design material flow
paths between the input/output (I/O) stations. On
the other hand the automated material handling
equipments such as AGVs, conveyers etcare
needing good flow path layout for transporting
materials from input station of one cell to output
station of another cell , as a poor flow path layout
degrades the quality and efficiency of material
handling system. This is termed as flow path layout
(material handling system) design problem. The
material moves from the input/output (I/O) point of
a department to the I/O point of the next
department on the routing specification. Generally,
the routings for each product or batch will be

All Rights Reserved 2016 IJORAT

different, and each product may only visit a subset

of the departments or work stations within a
facility. Such problems occur in many
organizations, including manufacturing cell design
[3], hospital design [4], land-use planning [5], and
construction-site management [6].
Slicing tree structure (STS) is commonly used
layout encoding technique. These slicing trees are
also used as the flow path networks of layouts. A
weakness shared by design skeleton approaches is
that they rely on designers or some heuristic
methods to transform skeletons into layouts [7]. A
more restrictive version of the slicing tree
formulation known as flexbay structure was
presented by Tate and Smith [8]. This
representation is easier to be encoded into a coding
scheme to implement a GA search. Das [9]
presented a mixed integer programming (MIP)
model for the machine layout problem of a FMS
and suggested a four-step heuristic methodology
for solving it. Compared to the STS approaches,
MIP formulations are able to capture all aspects of
the facility layout but are very difficult to solve
using traditional branch-and-bound approaches, as
pointed out by Rajasekharan et al. [10]. Owing to
the complexity of the problem, Dass [9] method
requires considerable computational time. Using
the model of Das [9], Rajasekharan et al. [10]
proposed a GA-based heuristic to solve the MIP
problem more efficiently. Murata et al. [11]
proposed Sequence Pair (SP) representation, an
elegant layout encoding technique for VLSI floor
planning problem which can handle departments of
fixed dimension. SP is evaluated by a Longest
Common Subsequence (LCS) computation based

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International Journal of Research in Advanced Technology IJORAT

Vol 1, Issue 9, NOVEMBER 2016

evaluation technique proposed by Xiaoping et al.

[12].
The remainder of the paper is organized as
follows. In Section 2, we define the problem
formally, and in Section 3, propose the new
approach, describing genetic algorithm based
layout optimization approach, Section 4, and we
present numerical experiments and in Section 5
make concluding remarks.

'
x x (1 u )
w u h
i
i
i i
i i

'
y y (1 u )
h u w
i
i
i i
i i

The facility layout design problem considered in

this work, has N number of departments which are
to be placed in production floor layout of width W
and height H. The departments are considered to be
rectangular blocks with known dimension of width
w and height h. Figure 1 shows the conventions
used to define a department, wherein the location
of the input and output station of the departments
are denoted by (Ix, Iy) and (Ox, Oy) respectively,
with the local origin, set to the lower left corner of
the department. The distance between the I/O
points of the rectangular departments is estimated
using the Perimeter Distance Metric (PDM).
Given the width and height of the individual
department (determined by the size and shape of
the machines, and the intra-cell layout of the
department concerned), the predefined input and
output stations at the boundary of the department
and quantum and frequency of material flow
between the departments, the aim is to find the
relative location, exact position (x and y
coordinates) and orientation of the individual
departments, exact position (x and y coordinates) of
I/O stations, and to decide the shortest flow path
distance between the departments (along the
department perimeter) with the objective of
minimizing 1. The total material handling cost
(TMHC) and 2. Distance weighted cost of total
closeness rating score (TCRS) given in equation 1.
In any facility layout design problem, while it is
imperative to minimize the total material handling
cost which is directly proportional to the distance
between the departments, often it is also essential
to place certain departments as farthest (or nearest)
as possible depending upon the nature of the
production process, the safety issues and the like.
Hence these two important objectives are
considered in this work.

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(3)

(4)

y I (O ) y (1 u )
(1 v )I (O y )
i
i
i
i
i
( w I (O x ))
u (1 v )
i
i
i
i
( h I (O y ) )
(1 u )
v
i
i
i i
I (O x ))
u v
i
i
i i
i , j

(6)

'
x l x W (1 l )
i
ij j
ij

i j

(7)

' ' I (O ) I (O )
x ,y ,x
,y
0
i i i
i

i j

(8)

(9)

u ,v {0 ,1 }
i i

(10)

l ,b {0 ,1 }
ij ij

i,j

(11)

Where, P ( wP Ph ) is a penalty term the

guarantee that the layout solution satisfies the
following
floor
boundary
condition x i ' w i, y i ' H i
,

P max 0 , max x' W , P max 0 , max y' H

w
i i
h
i i

, and = the weight of penalty and was set to be

algebraic sum of flow interaction between each pair
of departments.
Constraints (2) and (3) define the x-coordinate
of the right boundary and the y-coordinate of the
upper boundary of each department. Constraints (4)
and (5) specify the x and y coordinates of I/O
stations for each department. These coordinates are

(1)

(5)

l l b b 1
ij
ji
ij
ji

'
y b y H (1 b )
i
ij j
ij

Minimize Combined Objective Function

Subject to:

(2)

x I (O ) x (1 u )(1 v ) I (O x )
i
i
i
i
i
I (O y )
u (1 v )
i i
i
( w I (O x ))(1 u )v
i
i
i i
( h I (O y ))u v
i
i
i
i i

II. MODELLING FRAMEWORK

N N
N N
(COF) c f d r d P
i 1 j 1 ij ij ij i 1 j 1 ij ij

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International Journal of Research in Advanced Technology IJORAT

Vol 1, Issue 9, NOVEMBER 2016

expressed in generalized terms with respect to the

lower-left corner point of the department under the
horizontal configuration, that is, before considering
rotation. Constraints (6) (7) and (8) ensure that
there is no overlap between any pair of departments
by letting each pair of departments be separated in
the x or y direction. One of the advantage of SP is,
once a sequence-pair is given, the binary variables
lij and bij can be fixed at 0 or 1 according to the
given sequence-pair and constraint (6) is removed.
Constraints (9) (10) and (11) specify the bounds for
each variable.
As the shortest contour distance from (output
station of) department i to (input station of)
department j (dij) cannot be calculated directly by
the execution of MIP model, it cannot be solved by
the MIP solvers.

III. GENETIC ALGORITHM (GA)

The following sections present the chromosome
representation and decoding, the evolutionary
process.

3.2.2 Crossover operator

For first part (SP) of the chromosome, for first and
second sequence of the sequence pair,
independently we implement relative fitness
crossover instead of absolute fitness crossover
operation, because it will moderate the selection
pressure and control the rate of convergence. The
first child is constructed by randomly picking a
gene from the first parent and placed it in a child
string at the same location as its position in the
parent sequence. This process is continued for k
departments where k is proportional to the relative
fitness of the first parent. The missing integers in
the first child are filled in the same order as they
appear in the second parent. Similarly the second
child string is created by reversing the selection
order of two strings. For the last two parts of a
chromosome, a heterosexual one-point crossover
was adopted. Crossover operation is exercised on
the chromosomes of the intermediate population
with a probability, known as cross over probability
(pc). .
3..3 Mutation operator

3.1 Chromosome Representation

In a GA approach feasible solutions to the problem
are encoded into a string of decision choices that
resemble chromosomes. The chromosome that
represents a feasible solution problem is shown in
Fig. 1
1)Sequence pair

2)Orientation String 3)Offset distance

In this GA design, mutation operation is used in a

broader sense than traditional method. Instead of
performing gene-by-gene mutation, with very small
probability at each generation, a random number
r is generated for each individual. If mutation
probability (pm) < r, then the particular individual
undergoes mutation process.

...4231... ...2143... ...1011... ...0010... ...0110... ...1110...

IV. NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTS

Fig. 1 A sample chromosome

In this section we report the results obtained on a

set of experiments conducted to evaluate the
performance of the Genetic Algorithm (GA)
proposed in this paper.

3.2 Evolutionary process.

The reproduction and crossover operators
determine which parents will have offsprings, and
how genes are exchanged between the parents to
create those offsprings. Mutation allows for
random alteration of genes. While reproduction and
crossover operators tend to increase the quality of
the populations and force convergence, mutation
tends to bring in divergence.

4.1 Computational Results

The effectiveness of GA is evaluated by solving the
three test problem instances reported in the
previous literatures. These problem instance is:
1. The test problem with 12 departments was
taken from Welgama and Gibson [12].

3.2.1 Reproduction operator

The selection module is constructed on the basis of
roulette wheel mechanism. The probability of
selection for each chromosome is based on a fitness
value relative to the total fitness value of the
population. The selection module ensures
reproduction of more number of highly fit
chromosomes compared to the number of less fit
chromosomes. This selection process is repeated as
many times and as equal to the population size.

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The best solution obtained using GA for the test

problem instance is reported below in Table 1.

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International Journal of Research in Advanced Technology IJORAT

Vol 1, Issue 9, NOVEMBER 2016

TABLE I: Best Solution

REFERENCES
1.

Number of
Departments

Measure
Type

W1

W2

OF 1

OF 2

12

PDM

0
0.5
1

1
0.5
0

9668
9124
8291.5

6246
7003
7850.5

V. CONCLUDING REMARKS AND SCOPE

FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
To overcome the limitations out of sequential
design procedure in this research work and
integrated layout design approach was adopted to
design inter-cell layout and the material handling
system simultaneously. Sequence-pair (SP)
representation is used for layout encoding and
longest common subsequence (LCS) methodology
for its translation.
Again, to simultaneously
optimize two different objective of the integrated
layout design (ILD) problem a Genetic Algorithm
(ESGA) approach was developed in this work.
From our experimentation it was understood
that, since so many layout combinations has to be
explored and evaluated in particular for larger size
problems, the outcome of this research leaves
scope for further research towards employing a
local search mechanism in finding best solutions.

All Rights Reserved 2016 IJORAT

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