Track: Facilities Planning and Management

Abstract

Dealing with industrial risks is a major issue in the design, management and control of production systems. However, the analysis of why and how risks should be taken into account does not seem to be considered as a global question by researchers, who have mostly focused on specific problems, such as stochasticity or uncertainty. The aim of this article is to point out the importance of risk management and control at a more global level during the design of production systems. More particularly, we discuss opportunities to design facility layout solutions that contribute to avoid, prevent, or reduce certain types of industrial risks taken in the broad sense (flow risks, reliability risks, quality risks, safety risks, environment risks, etc.). We discuss the kinds of risks that such facility layout solutions would allow considering. We address the issue of how to represent risks so that they could be taken into account, and we review existing academic and industrial approaches that are close to this topic. We show that approaching risks with facility layout solutions is a promising research direction that is worth more investigation.