ABSTRACT
After the optimum work flow has been determined to change the form from raw material and bought-in components to the finished product through the conversion process, as established by process planning, the next problem is to determine a spatial location for a collection of physical production facilities associated with that specified work flow, in connection with the operators, the plant location and the site. This decision system is called layout planning/design. Various procedures for layout planning have been proposed and developed. Most of them use some sort of heuristic approach, since optimisation analysis is rather difficult for both process and layout planning. An organised approach, referred to as systematic layout planning or simply Systematic Layout Planning (SLP), developed by Richard Muther, has received considerable publicity due to its practical application in determining an appropriate 'best' layout plan.
