A hybrid approach for dynamic assembly shop floor layout

Highly turbulent environment of dynamic job-shop operations affects the shop floor layout problem as well as other areas. Due to frequently altering needs of layout, essential requirements such as adaptability and proactive responsiveness to the dynamic changes need to be considered in addition to the materials handling and machine relocation costs when a shop floor is reconfigured from one layout to the next. Targeting the autonomy and adaptability of dynamic and distributed job-shop assembly operations, this paper proposes to incorporate function block methodology to deal with the layout issues of the frequently changing environment. This is an extension to the authors´ previous work.