Minimization of acquisition and operational costs in horizontal material handling system design

This paper considers the problem of minimizing the fixed cost of acquiring material handling transporters and the operational cost of material transfer in a manufacturing system. This decision problem, which arises during manufacturing facility design, is modeled using an integer programming formulation. Since the problem is NP-complete, two efficient heuristics are developed to solve it. Computational complexity, worst-case performance analysis, and extensive computational tests are provided for both heuristics. The results indicate that the proposed methods are well suited for large-scale manufacturing applications.