Workshop facility layout design based on the central point of material handling

In order to simplify the optimization on workshop facility layout, a new approach is proposed in this paper by dividing the facilities in workshop to several rectangular production cells and introducing the concept of central point of material handling. Based on this idea, the objective function in aiming to minimize the cost of material handling is established and genetic algorithm method is applied in optimizing the solution. The proposed approach was applied to a case study and results show that the method could enhance the enterprise´s ability in facility design in reducing the cost of material handling easily.