Automatic Evaluation of Facility Layouts Through Graph Matching

This work presents a method for determining whether an industrial layout configuration is compliant with design specifications and constraints. Functional specifications are modelled by an undirected graph. The nodes of the graph represent those spaces which are considered essential for the industry to carry out its activity. An edge connecting two nodes indicates that such activity involves frequent movements of people or materials between the corresponding spaces, and therefore they must be located close to each other for the sake of efficiency. Manual verification of compliance with these specifications is time consuming and error prone. In order to automatically check if a facility layout includes all the essential spaces and they are arranged so that all proximity requirements are met, we developed a software which converts a layout drawing into its graph representation and compares the obtained graph with the target graph. The proposed system comes in handy in an engineering teaching setting, as it saves the instructor from manually verifying that the layouts created by the students comply with the project specifications. To demonstrate the usefulness of this approach we evaluated different solutions to a facility layout problem with the developed software. The results show that our system reliably detects any non-compliance with specifications.