INSERTION HEURISTIC FOR THE SINGLE ROW LAYOUT PROBLEM IN FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

An important problem in a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is to obtain a layout of machines such that material handling is the most efficient. Since poor layout would result in more parts spending longer time moving from one machine to another, developing layout for FMS is dealing with the arrangement of machines in the shop floor in order to minimize the total flow of parts in the system. In this paper, a single row layout problem is considered, and a heuristic approach, called the insertion heuristic, to solve the problem is proposed. The proposed approach is tested on benchmark problems available in the literature and the results are presented. Key words: FMS, Single row unequal area layout, Insertion Heuristic