Date of Award

5-1993

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Industrial Engineering (MSIE)

Department

Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Abstract

The focus of this research is to develop a new heuristic for solving the one-dimensional machine location problem. The major objective is to assign a set of machines to different locations available along a material handling path, so that the total material handling distance (or time) is minimized. One-dimensional machine layout problems with both symmetric and asymmetric flows are addressed in this research.

Based on the flow pattern of materials between the machines, a construction heuristic is developed here to solve the machine layout problem. The same heuristic is used to solve the problems with asymmetric and symmetric flows. The backtracking problem is considered as a sub-problem of the bi-directional flow problem. Both the backtracking and bi-directional flow problems are solved simultaneously. In problems with asymmetric flows, both backtracking and bi-directional flow problems are considered while for problems with symmetric flows, the total backtracking distance is half the total distance due to bi-directional flow.

Heuristic solutions are compared with the existing standard methods in the literature. A lower bound on the optimal solution to the problem is developed for both uni-directional and bi-directional flows. The computational complexity is also calculated for the heuristic, and the actual computation time taken for solving a specific problem is also reported.

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