UN NUEVO ENFOQUE EVOLUTIVO PARALELO EN EL PROBLEMA DE DISTRIBUCIÓN EN PLANTA

Abstract

The placement of facilities in a plant is known to have a significant impact on work in process, lead times, productivity and manufacturing costs. Where to locate facilities and the efficient design of those facilities are important and fundamental strategic issues in any manufacturing industry. A novel evolutionary approach based on island model to solve the unequal facility layout problems (UA-FLP) using a flexible bay structure representation is presented in this paper. This one consists on a genetic algorithm based on a multiple-population coarse-grained model, whose aim is to maintain the diversity of the population and get a better sampling of the search space, providing a better quality of solutions. Our proposal has been tested with a collection of well-known problems. Moreover, the results obtained have been compared with the best proposals published in the literature. Our approach have obtained, in many cases, better solutions than previous ones.