Routing Flexibility for Unequal-Area Stochastic Dynamic Facility Layout Problem in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Any manufacturing system must be consistent with potential changes such as fluctuations in demand. Uncertainty also makes the above issue more essential. Routing Flexibility (RF) is one of the necessities to any modern manufacturing system such as Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). This paper proposed three mixed integer nonlinear programming models for the Unequal-Area Stochastic Dynamic Facility Layout Problems (UA–SDFLPs) by considering the Routing Flexibility. The models were proposed when the independent demands followed the random variable with Poisson, Exponential, and Normal distributions. For the validation of the proposed models, many small-sized test problems derived from a real case in the literature were solved. The large-sized test problems were solved by Genetic Algorithm (GA) in a reasonable amount of computational time. The obtained results indicated that the discussed models for the UA–SDFLPs were valid and the managers could take these models to the manufacturing floor to adapt to the potential changes in today's competitive market.