Facility Planning - Assignment Example

United States spends over 250 billion each year in planning and re-planning of facilities. The planning of facilities deals with layout, design and accommodation of machines, people and systems or enterprise activities within a physical special environment. Three types exist in manufacturing system, which includes process layout, product layout and group layout and they are further classified into flow line, cell and centre (Khusna, Siti, Jamasri, and Hideki 1). Simulation tools in planning include Flexsim software, QUEST (17), Arena (9), Witness (21), ProModel (25) and IGRIP (17).

The tools used for optimizing layout design include Simulated Annealing (SA), Tabu Search (TS), and Genetic Algorithms (GA) (Khusna et el. 3). Different studies have been carried out by different authors to explain the application of those tools. Different investigations have been carried out to identify the appropriate tools for planning and manufacturing process though they have been faced with limitation such as time. The studies done found out that the facility design analysis such as material handling system and layout are crucial in manufacturing industries (Khusna et el. 3).