Application of expert systems and pattern recognition methodologies to facilities layout planning

Abstract

This paper deals with two basic concepts of artificial intelligence (AI), from a facilities layout problem domain perspective. In this work, the facilities layout problem is treated as a multi-objective situation. From conventional multi-objective perspective, the philosophy underlying this work is not a different one. However, the qualitative constraints are handled via a symbolic manipulation structure. The two conceptualizations are: (a) an expert system and (b) a pattern recognition system. In the expert system, the heuristics used are based on the augmented transition networks of natural language processing. In the pattern recognition system, the use of productions rules to capture the expert knowledge is illustrated. For both the systems example problems are given.