Determining workstation groups in a fixed factory facility based on biological computation

Abstract

A strategy for making layout decisions is an important element in developing operating systems in manufacturing factories or other industrial plants. In this paper, we look at fixed factory facilities and propose a method for designing different sorts of layouts related to factories running at high-volume and producing a low-variety of products. Where many tasks are called, each with a different task time, it can be difficult to arrange a fixed factory facility in the optimal way. Therefore, we propose a computational method using DNA molecules for designing production systems by determining all the feasible workstation groups in a fixed factory facility, and we show that this computation method can be generally applied to layout decisions. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.