Facility layout and emerging advanced material handling optimization

Abstract

This research explores the intersection of facility layout and vehicle routing, beginning with a study on a real-world semiconductor manufacturing facility layout problem (FLP), followed by a study of facility layout alternative analysis for the implementation of autonomous warehousing robots, and concluding with a research of the vehicle routing problems (VRPs) for the warehousing robots. The rst study proposes a new type of FLP with space utilization concerns to determine if the existing facility is large enough to accommodate the machines required by a suite of capacity contingency plans. New efficient heuristic solution procedures have been developed to help our industry partner identify the facility layout alternatives for future demand satisfaction. The second study seeks to determine if any common warehouse layouts that work well with only human pickers are also preferable when novel autonomous warehousing systems are deployed. In order to answer the question, the warehousing behavior of the autonomous system is modeled as a vehicle routing problem (VRP) with multiple synchronization constraints. Numerical experiments are conducted and analyzed to provide guidelines for warehouse design under the proposed routing systems. The Third study proposes an e cient heuristic to solve two related routing problems for the autonomous warehousing systems. Numerical analyses conducted indicate that the heuristic is able to provide optimal or near-optimal solutions in a reasonable computing time for practical situations and demonstrate the bene t associated with the proposed routing model. In conclusion, managerial insights of these three studies and the potential future research are discussed.