An AR-based hybrid approach for facility layout planning and evaluation for existing shop floors

Facility layout planning (FLP) has substantial impact on the various aspects of a manufacturing system. FLP is typically performed for new shop floors. However, enterprises nowadays are often faced with the need to reconfigure the existing shop floor layouts to synchronize the shop floor operations with the constantly changing production targets. FLP tasks for existing shop floors are often small in scale, e.g., adding or removing a couple of machines, but complex to address since a wide range of criteria need to be incorporated and the presence of the existing facilities imposes critical constraints. Current FLP approaches are not efficient to handle these issues. The development of computer-aided design (CAD) technology has provided feasible solutions to bridge this gap. In this paper, an augmented reality (AR)-based hybrid approach is proposed which facilitates on-site layout planning and evaluation in real time. By integrating AR technology with the mathematical modeling technique, the proposed approach allows the users to augment the shop floor with the facilities to be laid out, model the existing facilities to obtain their geometric data, and define the criteria and constraints to formulate the problems as multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) models. Two planning methods are employed to solve the MADM models, namely, information-aided manual planning and analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-genetic algorithm (GA)-based automatic planning. During the planning process, the criteria and the constraints are assessed in real time to provide immediate evaluation and feedback to facilitate decision-making.