Plant Layout Design: A Review Survey

Abstract

Plant layout design is related to the location of facilities (e.g. machines, departments) in a plant. They are known to greatly impact the system performance. Numerous research works related to facility layout have been published. A few literature reviews exist, but they are not recent or are restricted to certain specific aspects of these layout design. The literature analysis given here is recent and not restricted to specific considerations about layout design.

We suggest a general framework to design plant layout and present existing works using such criteria as: the manufacturing system features, Preliminaries of Layout Planning, defining layout problem, workshop characteristics impacting the layout and methods, techniques and software available for designing plant layout.