Design of flexible layouts for manufacturing systems

In this paper, we address the problem of designing flexible plant layouts for manufacturing facilities where product demands are subject to variability. We extend existing procedures for layout design by: (1) explicitly capturing the stochastic nature of product demands and the resulting material variability in flows between different processing departments; (2) allowing for the possibility of multiple processing departments of the same type to exist in the same facility; and (3) letting material flows between pairs of individual departments be determined simultaneously with the layout and as function of the demand scenarios.