Design Support of Transportation Routing for a Multi Layered Factory

Recently, it becomes important to improve transportation capability to attain high productivity in manufacturing. One of the necessary schemes to attain the purpose is that the floor layout is initially to be optimized. After the floor layout is determined, reasonable equipment position for transportation is decided. Then the design of the transportation route is to be determined. In this paper, design support system for transportation routing, based on agent method is proposed. To optimize the transportation route, the working space by the side of the equipment is to be prepared. Starting from given floor layout of a three layered factory, an appropriate transportation route is pursuit using Ant algorithm. To check the applicability of the proposed method, case studies are carried out under various constraints and objective functions, and its effects were verified.