Invited Speaker---Prof. Kuan Yew Wong


Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Group, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Malaysia

Biography: Kuan Yew Wong received his PhD degree from the University of Birmingham, UK. He is a Professor of Industrial Engineering at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Malaysia. He leads the Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Group, working in close collaboration with industries and other stakeholders to develop and implement solutions for operational improvement. Before joining the academia, he was an engineer in a Japanese multinational manufacturing company. He is a Chartered Engineer, Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of The Chartered Institute for IT (formerly known as British Computer Society). He has headed and completed various research projects funded by the Malaysia’s Ministry of Higher Education, Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, Intel Technology Ptd Ltd and Mexico State Council of Science and Technology. He is also an editorial board member of a number of international journals.

Speech Title: Solving Unequal-Area Facility Layout Problems using an Evolutionary Algorithm
Abstract: Facility layout problems deal with finding the locations and arrangements of machines, cells, facilities or departments in a workspace. Specifically, unequal-area facility layout problems were investigated in order to minimize the sum of the material handling costs. Exact methods could not solve these problems within a reasonable computational time when the number of departments increased, due to their complexity. Therefore, an evolutionary algorithm was proposed to solve them. A local search method and a swapping technique were used to improve its performance. Although each of the departments could have different areas and shapes, their respective areas and shapes were fixed throughout the time horizon and during the iteration of the algorithm. The proposed algorithm was tested by using some problem instances selected from the literature. Based on the results, the proposed algorithm has generated encouraging layouts in comparison to other methods.