Technologies applied to solve facility layout problems with resilience – a systematic review

Abstract

In the industry, the need to optimize daily tasks became mainly a requirement to stay competitive. The Facility Layout Problem (FLP) arises from this need and is the most used technique to improved manufacturing processes. Over the years, the distribution of the different facilities became more complex and more susceptible to interventions in their usual workflow. Hence, FLPs emerged to solve these interventions. This capacity to solve various problems is known as resilience. By searching the literature for information on technologies used to solve FLP, many software solutions can be obtained. Still, none of them manage resilience as a factor in the solution. They have also not been compiled in an analysis to determine the most modern options for existing solutions. The current study reviews the most widely used software tools that solve FLP and how these studies view resilience. A systematic literature review was applied to select relevant studies from 2015–2021. This work allowed analyzing a final sample of 133 articles obtained in two different search strings. As a result, this study identified two manners to solve FLP with software tools: using already developed tools and developing an own tool. In the former, three proprietary software were identified: MATLAB, CPLEX, and LINGO. When developing their software tool, the technology used varies significantly between studies. They use very different language programming, depending on the researcher’s domain. Furthermore, the results do not find any case in which some resilience factor was part of the solution obtained.