Abstract
The layout of a production plant has a significant impact on the operations’ efficiency in terms of material handling costs. The planimetric organization of the work areas therefore has the purpose of facilitating the flow of operational flows in order to maximize productivity and reduce waste.
With this in mind, Muther's well-known Systematic Layout Planning provides a specific sequence of procedures for the implementation of an effective and systematic layout organization project.
The redesign of the layout is treated at the same time from an analytical point of view within what operational research defines as the Facility Layout Problem, or rather the problem of optimizing the arrangement of departments within a production site.
This study is part of both research fields, providing the designer with a method that allows defining the production layout by integrating Systematic Layout Planning with mathematical modeling approaches.
The experimental study of redesigning the layout of a business unit of the company Grafos Steel S.r.l. presented in this paper is based on Systematic Layout Planning and is enriched by the application of a non-linear optimization method that expands and personalizes the two-phase method of Anjos and Vieira to obtain one of the work areas within a production site.
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