GRAPHICAL LAYOUT DESIGN TOOL FOR FACILITY LAYOUT

The typical plant layout objectives are to minimize investment in equipment and material handling cost, minimize overall production time, to minimize variation in types of material handling equipment, and to meet the requirement of building and site constraints. The optimum plant layout was solved by usinlgg iconic models and analytical approaches such as exact mathematical procedures, probabilistic model, graph theory, and heuristics methods. These procedures can be classified as construction method and improvement method. Graphical Layout Design Tool ( GLADE) is the construction method tools usinlgg the flow between departments as gravitational pull. The approach consists of two parts: ( a) construction of a layout based on a set of rules and restrictions, and (b) improvement of the layout based on interaction with decision maker. It provides decision maker the visualization of the department and flow which could reduces the flow crossinlgg problem. GLADE was applied on various data sets and was compared the performance with ALDEP and SLP. The results show that GLADE works very well on the sparse matrix.