In today’s competitive global environment, industries manufacture different types of products to fulfill market demands. This results into a number of diversified processes to be performed in industries. These processes are performed on different machines to produce a final product. So, a need arises for proper arrangement of machines in the workplace. For this, plant layout is an effective tool for allocating different machines to a different location. The main objective of plant layout is to provide smooth workflow throughout the facility.  In this paper, a new model of the process type of plant layout is provided with an aim of minimizing the total material flow cost by reducing the unnecessary movement between the machines. The genetic algorithm is suggested to compute allocations of machines and estimation of cost incurred in the layout. Finally, a numerical illustration is discussed for reducing the material flow cost to prove the efficacy of the proposed model.

Keywords

Process layout; Plant layout problem; Genetic algorithm; Material handling cost