Layout design with hexagonal floor plans and material flow patterns

This research studies the facility layout problem from the perspective of geometric structures. It reports that a regular hexagonal floor plan has shorter expected travel distance using rectilinear and Euclidean distance compared to popular floor plans having equal area in practice, including rectangular, square, and square-diamond. For this analysis, both probability and simulation models were developed. Based on this result, this paper proposes two layout applications using the regular hexagonal floor plan and its compatible material flow patterns. The analyses show that the newly proposed layout applications perform better than conventional layout alternatives used for flexible manufacturing systems.