Design of Dynamic Body Shop Layout in Automobile Industry

Flexible manufacturing and customization is a considerable topic in modern manufacturing automobile industry. However, challenges still remain on the responsiveness of production system to the fluctuation of production demand. In this paper we developed a flexible machine layout that is not restricted to equal size machines. The layout optimizes the trade-offs between increased material handling costs as requirements change and machine rearrangement costs needed to adapt the layout to these changes. The proposed flexible machine layout design procedure formulates a robust machine layout design problem over a rolling horizon planning time window.