There is much uncertainty and fuzziness in product quality attributes or quality parameters of a manufacturing process, so the traditional quality control chart can be difficult to apply. This paper proposes a fuzzy control chart. The plotted data was obtained by transforming expert scores into fuzzy numbers. Two types of nonconformity judgment rules-necessity and possibility measurement rules-are proposed. Through graphical analysis, the nonconformity judging method (i.e., assessing directly based on the shape feature of a fuzzy control chart) is proposed. For four different widely used membership functions, control levels were analyzed and compared by observing gaps between the upper and lower control limits. The result of the case study validates the feasibility and reliability of the proposed approach.

Unequal area facilities layout problem (UA-FLP) is an inevitable problem in the process of new construction, reconstruction, and expansion of enterprises. The rationality of the facilities layout has a great influence on the operation performance of the production system. Finding the optimal solution of UA-FLP according to the requirement of production process is the main content of the plant design. The facilities were constrained by given areas and aspect ratio, respectively. By adopting the method of slicing tree, the layout space was divided into multiple regions for each facility. The genetic algorithm was developed by using layered coding to show the slicing process. Considering the production logistics cost as well as the adjacency relations between the facilities, the goal function was established and the optimal solution was obtained by running the proposed algorithm. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed approach was validated by a set of known problems. The comparison results show that it can provide decision support for rapid optimal layout of multifacilities.

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