A Facility Layout Problem in a Marble Factory via Simulation

Abstract

The marble factory in this study is a typical instance of a flow shop based production system. Adding new machines to the plant and/or introducing a new product may convert the actual layout to an inefficient one. Such cases may cause a significant increase in transportation of materials between machines that decreases the utilization rates of machines and operators as well as overall productivity. Therefore, facility planning is a key issue in marble plants in terms of total cost and customer satisfaction. Another important property of these plants is its dynamic and stochastic behavior in terms of scrap rates, demands and processing times. The aim of this study is to develop an efficient plant layout for such dynamic systems. At first, the simulation model of the current system is built on ARENA 10.0. Then, an alternative layout is generated after some analysis and then, it is evaluated via simulation model. The proposed layout provides reduction in total transportation time as well as an increase in productivity.