Systems Engineering Approach to Floor and Staff-Shift Layout Design

Abstract

This chapter presents a description of layout design methods that include both spatial and temporal planning problems in service production and consumption. First, a brief introduction describes the proposed wider concept of service manufacturing systems, then layout planning methods of kitchen in a food-service industry and staff-shift planning method are also described as part of the wider concept. Kitchens in the food-service industry are labor-intensive environments. Their productivity depends on the flow of people and foods, such that traditional mathematical programming approaches are difficult to apply for optimization of kitchen facility layouts. In turn, planning work-shifts of staff members is also difficult in such complex kitchen environments because of the preferences and availability of the respective workers. A new facility layout planning method combining simulation and genetic algorithms (GA) is proposed. Simulations are executed to calculate the fitness of individuals in GA. Then, Combinatorial auction-based staff-shift layout design method is also proposed. Computational experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.