A proposed study on facility planning and design in manufacturing process

Facility planning is concerned with the design, layout, and accommodation of people, machines and activities of a system or enterprise within a physical spatial environment. Facility planning is very important in a manufacturing process due to their effect in achieving an efficient product flow. It is estimated that between 20%-50% of the total costs in manufacturing is related to material handling. This cost can be reduced until 30% through an effective facility planning. Proper analysis of facility layout design could improve the performance of production line such as decrease bottleneck rate, minimize material handling cost, reduces idle time, raise the efficiency and utilization of labour, equipment and space. Many researches have been done in finding optimum facility design. Heuristic methods for layout optimization are Tabu Search (TS), Simulated Annealing (SA), and Genetic Algorithms (GA). Beside the heuristic methods, simulation technique is also recommended in optimizing of facility design. This paper discusses on previous study and significant finding in facility planning and design. A research direction on facility layout design using combination of methods has been proposed.