Augmented reality assisted facility layout digitization and planning

Facility layout planning (FLP) has an important role in manufacturing industries. There are few approaches to solve FLP such as procedural, algorithmic, virtual reality (VR) based and augmented reality (AR) based approaches. This research is about AR assisted FLP (ARFLP) to visualize the arrangement of virtual models in real facilities environment in real-time. It can check the material travel distance and total area occupied by the facilities. In the ARFLP system, the virtual model design is flexible and can be modified easily to suit the actual environment. A single row layout production line was chosen as a case study with four common types of layout considered: straight line, W-shaped, U-shaped and V-shaped layouts. The best location for the new machine was suggested for each layout. ARFLP has proven to be able to check and visualize the position of a new machine to be added to the existing layout.