Facility Layout Planning of Central Kitchen in Food Service Industry: Application to the Real-Scale Problem

Abstract

Central kitchen is a food producing factory to improve productivity in the food-service industry, to pursue scale-merit by aggregation of tasks in multiple stores into one place. However, the central kitchen is still labor intensive production environment because of tradeoff between quality and quantity of products, so that the handicraft of skilled workers cannot be eliminated. In addition, there are many parttime workers as well as full-time ones, as a result, operators can be also uncertain factors. Furthermore, customer demand forecast is also difficult according to not only susceptible to weather and seasonal variation but also influence from irregular events held around the restaurant. Due to such characteristics of the food service industry, it is also difficult to plan proper facility layout of the central kitchen to achieve both optimality and adaptability to the complexity. In this study, a new facility layout planning method of the central kitchen is proposed, where not only optimization but simulation is also adopted; flow of workers as well as products can be considered simultaneously. Computer experiments in which the proposed method is applied to the real-scale problem are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Using a Cooking Operation Simulator to Improve Cooking Speed in a Multiproduct Japanese Cuisine Restaurant

“…First, Japanese cuisine chefs shun mutual cooperation because of their pride and habits. They believe that if a chef is supported by another chef, then the former must be regarded as "less-skilled" [12]. Moreover, sushi and washoku chefs dislike working together because they belong to different guilds.…”

“…To resolve the problems, a cooking operation simulator was developed to optimize the kitchen layout based on a food factory simulator [12]. The system simulates the cooking time of individual orders.…”

Automated design space exploration for poultry processing systems using discrete-event simulation

“…Rijpkema et al [10], Parthanadee and Buddhakulsomsiri [8], and Masoud et al [12] combine both, and show the importance of evaluating multiple production scenarios when using discrete-event simulation to compare alternative designs. Finally, Fujii et al [11] and Masoud et al [12] show a form of automated design space exploration to solve the facility layout planning problem. However, in both methods, the design is regarded as the spatial layout of the system, with the goal being to minimize the distance that products or workers need to travel.…”

“…In Fujii et al [11] simulation is used to optimize the design of the facility layout of a central kitchen in the food service industry. The proposed method for layout planning is validated through a real-scale case study.…”

“…Bruzzone and Longo [6], Penazzi et al [7], and Plà-Aragonés et al [9] show how simulation can be used to evaluate the performance of a food processing system across a range of production scenarios. Owens and Levary [5], Fujii et al [11], and Gao et al [13] demonstrate how simulation can be used to compare alternative designs in the design process of food processing systems. Rijpkema et al [10], Parthanadee and Buddhakulsomsiri [8], and Masoud et al [12] combine both, and show the importance of evaluating multiple production scenarios when using discrete-event simulation to compare alternative designs.…”