Multiple-floor facilities layout design

This research is related to the layout design considering with problems of multi-floor and elevators' location designs. The attempts to achieve are basically minimizing both layout cost and flow distances among entire factory. The developing procedures include three stages: the first stage is to assign appropriate departments for each floor; the second stage is the traditional plant layout design within a floor; the third stage is to search feasible locations for different sets of elevators. The Threshold Accepting (TA) algorithm is used for finding feasible solution. This research also uses space filling curve (SFC) method to find the optimal solution for locating departments. The analyzed results show that the proposed procedures and methods can reduce 58.25% the vertical material handling cost compared used in the same example. This result also shows that the proposed method can obtain better performance than previews researches.