The type of plant layout has very significant impact on the structure and operation of a manufacturing system. The current common and intuitive methods of selecting a suitable type of layout by using simple graphs of production volume versus number of parts manufactured in the plant, or production volume versus flexibility, can result in inaccurate decisions for such an important issue. This paper presents an alternative approach to the choice of plant layouts, which applies the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The methodology considers three main objectives for the selection of layouts: increasing flexibility, increasing production volume and reducing manufacturing costs. Each objective has a number of subobjectives. Three main types of layout are considered: functional (process) layout, group technology (cellular) layout and transfer (flow) lines. The AHP methodology has been applied as a knowledge-based system, which is integrated with another three knowledge-based systems for the technical and social conditions required for the successful implementation of each of the above types of layout. An example of the application of the AHP methodology is presented, which represents an important step towards proper validation of the methodology.
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