Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to assist facility design practitioners, industrial managers, and expert systems (ES) developers identify important issues to consider and actions to follow in the selection of material handling (MH) equipment, overcome limitations of existing equipment selection approaches, and design complete MH systems. Design/methodology/approach -A framework that specifies the steps that have to be taken in the selection of MH equipment is suggested. It identifies categories of equipment based on all handling-related functions performed in a facility, which allows consideration of various categories of equipment, and selects equipment classes and types from among candidates based on user requirements and objectives. Findings -The suggested framework is capable of producing a wide range of equipment that performs various functions in a facility, and satisfies requirements and objectives without the need for using large data bases. Applying it requires cooperation of facility managers and designers. Research limitations/implications -Some of the steps of the suggested framework require further investigation and research. Practical implications -Facility design practitioners, industrial managers, and developers of ES can make better selection among a large number of MH equipment and design complete systems by relying on functions performed in a facility, requirements, and objectives. Originality/value -A framework for selection of MH equipment is lacking in the literature. This paper fills a gap by presenting design issues and organized steps that practitioners, managers, and expert system developers working on selection of MH equipment have to address and follow in order to design complete MH systems.

This paper presents a framework for the design of warehouse layout to organize the design process, facilitate the task of designers, and highlight important design issues to help warehouse managers make informed decisions. The framework accounts for several factors and operations of warehousing in the design, and addresses design decisions required to respond to them. It attempts to develop a layout that has several characteristics such as modularity, adaptability, compactness, accessibility, flexibility, and distribution of movement to enable it to respond to changing conditions, improve space utilization, and reduce congestion and movement.

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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assist facility designers decide when to use the graph‐theoretic (GTH) approach to develop a block layout and when to seek another alternative that requires a lesser effort. Difficulties encountered when a GTH block layout is developed from an adjacency graph could force designers to sacrifice or change some of the adjacencies of the adjacency graph in the GTH block layout. Consequently, the value of the objective function of a GTH block layout could become less than what would be expected from the GTH approach.Design/methodology/approachA computational study is performed to assess the value of the objective function of block layouts produced by the GTH approach when adjacencies of the adjacency graph are deleted or changed in the GTH block layout and two of the procedures in the literature.FindingsThe computational study reveals that the magnitude of the decline in the value of the objective function of the GTH block layout renders it comparable to values obtained by the two procedures selected from the literature.Originality/valueThe results of the study could motivate layout designers to resort to various approaches to develop a block layout rather than sacrifice some adjacencies of the adjacency graph in the GTH block layout, which would adversely affect its objective function value.