This study aims at improving the multi-floor layout of a card and packet production company based on the Systematic Layout Planning (SLP) method. A detailed study of the facility layout such as its operational processes, flow of materials and activity relationships has been done. Long distance, cross-traffic, and cost have been identified as the major problems of the current multi-floor layout. Three alternative layouts were suggested by SLP and the best alternative was selected and compared with the current layout. The results revealed that the new alternative layout could considerably improve the companys layout problems.

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Use of speed bumps as a traffic-calming technique is a key issue to a safe and smooth traffic flow. Lack of consideration on finding the best location for speed bump installation before stop points, such as traffic junctions, has provided the motivation to conduct this study. This paper investigates the influence of some main factors on determining bump location and to optimize the distance from bump to stop point in order to obtain the minimum speed at this point. A robust design was used whereby the effect of environmental noises on the parameters was investigated using the Taguchi design of experiments. A 2-level L8 inner array and an L4 outer array design is used to evaluate and analyze the results. The results suggested that the linear models effectively explain the performance indicators within the ranges of the factors. It can be concluded that the optimum setting suggested is at the most influential levels of the design parameters which yields a robust and insensitive design for speed bump installation after considering the effect of environmental noises. The car speed before bump has the greatest influence and also the most robust factor in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and mean analysis.

Capacitated minimax facility location-allocation (LA) is a type of facility problem which is of prime importance for emergency situation, since it directly affects the service response time to customers. Capacitated minimax LA problem is concerned with locating some new facilities and allocating their capacity to customers when the maximum travelled distance from customers to facilities is minimized. This study involves a fixed line barrier in a region with some border crossings along it which divides the area into two subregions. Although several studies have recently been done on this problem in which the customer locations are known with certainty, much less attention has been devoted to developing a comprehensive mathematical model for the probabilistic extension of customer locations when there are some restrictions in the region. In order to fill this gap, a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) model is proposed for facility LA when customer locations are randomly distributed according to a bivariate normal probability distribution. Finally, the BARON solver in the GAMS software is used to solve the model, and a numerical example is provided to demonstrate its efficiency.