Analysis of Dynamic and Static Approaches to Deal with the Stochastic Dynamic Facility Layout Problem

Stochastic dynamic facility layoutproblem is a multi-period problem in whichmaterials flow is a random variable so that itsparameters like expected value and variance arerandomly changed from period to period. In thispaper, to cope with such a problem, two quadraticassignment-based mathematical modelscorresponding to dynamic and static approachesare developed.The proposed models are verifiedand validated by performing various analysesincluding robustness, stability, and sensitivity byusing design of experiment and benchmarkmethods. Dynamic programming algorithm, whichis coded in Matlab is used to solve the proposedmodels. The main conclusions are as follows: (i)thefacility rearrangement cost affects the behavior,robustness, and stability of the dynamic layout (ii)decision maker’s attitude affects the robustness ofthe dynamic and the static layouts; and (iii)changes in the input parameters lead to differentlayout configurations and the inputs values affectstheir sensitivity ranking.