A revised electromagnetism-like mechanism for layout design of reconfigurable manufacturing system

The layout design problem is one of the most important issues for manufacturing system design and control. A revised electromagnetism-like mechanism (REM) is proposed in this paper for the layout design of reconfigurable manufacturing systems utilizing automated guided vehicle. First, the formal model considering both loaded and empty flows is given. Then the REM is developed to solve the proposed model. In the REM, particles are encoded discretely. The charge of a particle is calculated according the total material handling cost of the particle. In the local search procedure, variable neighbourhood search strategy based on Hamming distance is adopted. In the moving procedure, the particles are moved according to the ordering of each element. To verify the effect of the proposed method, several computation cases are carried out. The computation results show that the proposed method is able to get optimal solutions for small scale problems and near optimal solutions within limited computation time for large scale problems. This indicates that the proposed method is effective and efficient. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.