Building optimization

Abstract

The goal of designing a facility layout is to minimize the communication cost between the facilities. The paper presents an approach for minimizing the communication cost while considering the functional constraints. We present a nonlinear programming approach for the minimization of communication cost to determine the optimum room dimensions and demonstrate its application using an illustrative example. The problem is solved by Sequential Linear Programming. The objective function and all the constraints are linear in the neighborhood of the design point and an optimum obtained through simplex algorithm. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.