SYNTACTIC PATTERN RECOGNITION: AN APPLICATION TO FACILITIES LAYOUT PLANNING.

This paper describes the development of a two dimensional Web Grammar for generating, acceptable partial configurations for facilities layout planning. Given n departments, the relative placement of departments depends on their physical characteristics. Each of the partial configurations satisfy hard constraints pertaining to the physical characteristics. A combination of a set of partial configurations dictate a final layout configuration. The number of such final configurations generated depends on the number of productions of the Web Grammar. The development of a layout generation language is described in this paper. An analogy between the productions of the Web Grammar and rules of the facilities layout Expert System is drawn. The importance of developing a pattern recognition approach is demonstrated. The implementation experiences are discussed in depth and the results of the application of the Facilities Layout Web Grammar are described.