Spatial material flow in an assembly system

Source: Yossi Bukchini, Russell Meller, Qi Liu, 2005. Assembly system facility design.

This Material Flow Analysis diagram is a striking alternative application of MFA.  It addresses the design of an assembly system facility with several assembly lines of various shapes.  The above diagram shows the required material flows through the assembly system.

This paper addresses the design of an assembly system facility consisting of multiple assembly lines of different shapes. In such a design problem there are two conflicting objectives: (i) to minimize the overall area of the facility; and (ii) to maximize the efficiency of the material handling transportation system. We first address the optimization problem of objective (ii) when replacing objective (i) with a constraint on the facility area.  The objective function of the layout model is to minimize the distances traveled by material flow.

The problem is solved to optimize the assembly line in terms of space: