Weighted Euclidean distance based approach as a multiple attribute decision making method for plant or facility layout design selection

In response to increasing inflexible customer demands and to improve the competitive advantage, industrial organizations have to adopt strategies to achieve cost reduction, continual quality improvement, increased customer service and on-time delivery performance. Selection of the most suitable plant or facility layout design for an organization is one among the most important strategic issues to fulfill all these above-mentioned objectives. Nowadays, many industrial organizations have come to realize the importance of proper selection of the plant or facility layout design to survive in the global competitive market. Selecting the proper layout design from a given set of candidate alternatives is a difficult task, as many potential qualitative and quantitative criteria need to be considered. This paper proposes a Euclidean distance based approach (WEDBA) as a multiple attribute decision making method to deal with the complex plant or facility layout design problems of the industrial environment. Three examples are included to illustrate the approach.