Multiple-attribute decision-making approach for an energy-efficient facility layout design

Due to the trends of energy shortage and energy price rise, energy efficiency, which was always ignored over the past decades, becomes a worldwide hot issue and also a significant challenge for most factories. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate energy-relevant criterion as a key criterion with traditional criteria in the layout planning phase. As a multiattribute decision-making (MADM) problem, the evaluation and selection of facility layout alternatives are often difficult and time consuming since the criteria generally have different units and conflicting features. In this article, a MADM approach which incorporates the advantages of rough set theory, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is proposed to solve the facility layout design problem with considering both traditional layout criteria and energy relevant criteria. At first, rough set theory is integrated with AHP to determine the weights for each criterion of alternatives. Then, TOPSIS is applied to get the final alternative ranking. Besides, sensitivity analysis for both decision weights and production rates is performed, and a comparison among different decision-making approaches for the same problem is also studied to demonstrate the rationality of the final decision. Finally, a practical expanding case is studied to validate the proposed approach.