LAMA: optimization procedure for computing the minimum facility design cost

摘要

The present paper provides a description and demonstration of LAMA. LAMA is an optimization procedure that computes the minimum total cost of an integrated facility design. LAMA's main objective is to reduce the overall facility design cost in terms of the total layout and material handling costs; so as to maximize the system's throughput and transporter utilization rate, as well as to minimize the total number of transporters in the facility. The paper presents a demonstration of LAMA's capabilities. Such capabilities are considered as the measures of performance of the proposed optimization procedure. LAMA's capabilities refer to its unique way of arriving at the objective function value and number of transporter units; as well as its capability to search for an optimal solution at a given user-define percentage of improvement. In this paper, LAMA's capabilities are compared against the results of three previously published methods. In summary, LAMA arrives at a facility design with the least cost and it also estimates the optimum number of transporters needed in the system. The capability of estimating the number of transporters is one of LAMA's attributes that makes this procedure unique compared to other facility optimization procedures.