Subject: Industrial Engineering And Management

Topic: Facility Design

Difficulty: Medium

i) Computerized Relative Allocation of Facilities Technique (CRAFT):

• CRAFT is more popular than the other computer based layout procedures.

• It is improvement algorithm & starts with an initial layout & proceeds to improve the layout by interchanging the department’s pair wise to reduce the total material transportation cost.

• It does not give the Optimal Layout; but the results are good & near optimal, which can be later corrected to suit the need of the layout planner.

Features of CRAFT:

1. It attempts to minimize transportation cost,

Where $Transportation cost = flow \times distance \times unit cost$

1. It Requires assumptions that:

   (1) Move cost are independent of the equipment utilization &

   (2) Move costs are linearly related to the length of the move.

2. Distance matrix used is the rectilinear distance between department centroids

3. CRAFT being a path-oriented method, the final layout is dependent on the initial layout. Therefore, a number of initial layouts should be used as input to the CRAFT

4. CRAFT allows the use of dummy departments to represent fixed areas in the layout

5. CRAFT input requirements are as follows:

• Initial Layout

• Flow Data

• Cost per unit distance

• Total number of departments

• Fixed departments & their location

• Area of departments