Facility Layout Selection Using PROMETHEE II Method

Facility layout selection is an important and critical issue faced by every organization, while setting up and allocating the available or new facilities in a given location. While selecting the most suitable layout, due attention is usually paid to minimize the total transportation cost between different facilities. The importance of an effective facility layout design for efficient and smooth operation of an organization cannot be overlooked. It is well-recognized that a suitably designed facility layout represents the backbone of an organization and should be carefully organized. Placement of the available or new facilities within a selected area is a complex task for the designer, which requires the fulfilment of several conflicting objectives. It is therefore important for an organization to evaluate, design and select the most suitable layout for its functional effectiveness. Selecting the best facility layout for an industrial application from a finite set of candidate alternatives is an example of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) problem. In this paper, two real time examples of facility layout selection are presented to demonstrate the applicability of a highly potential MCDM method, i.e., PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment Evaluation). It is observed that the rankings of the alternative layouts obtained using the PROMETHEE II method almost match with those derived by the past researchers, which proves the potentiality of this method to solve such type of complex MCDM problems