TESTIMONIALS

‘Facilities Planning', Tompkins et al., 2002 John Wiley & Sons Inc.
The authors of this book note “… the majority of the available packages are CAD-based documentation or drawing tools …” and highlight PLANOPT as one of the very few layout optimization software packages.

 

'Facilities Design', Heragu, 2006 iUniverse, Inc.
The author of this book highlights how VIP-PLANOPT fills the gap between academic and industrial software packages, "Academic software packages that provide very good solutions exist, but these do not have high quality and user friendly interface that is required by practitoners. VIP-PLANOPT fills this gap well and is a software that places equal importance on: (1) providing a good graphical user-interface, and (2) generating near-optimal layouts using sophisticated algorithms."

 

"An Intelligent Expert System for Decision Analysis & Support in Multi-Attribute Layout Optimization", Ahmad, A.R., Ph.D. Thesis, University of Waterloo , Canada , 2005. http://etd.uwaterloo.ca/etd/arahim2005.pdf 

VIP-PLANOPT is cited in a shortlist of layout optimization software with the comments: “Our personal experience has demonstrated that VIP-PLANOPT™ is superior to many existing [automated layout design] systems in terms of speed and capability to handle large-scale problems”.

 

"Intelligent Decision Support System for Layout Design", Ahmad, A.R., Basir, O.A., Hassanein K., 2004 Proc. of the 9th APDSI, Seoul, Korea

" Our experience shows that VIP-PLANOPT is likely to be the fastest and the most robust system for handling more than 40 modules".

 

"Computer Aided Optimium Layout Design of an Indutrial Facility" , Qershi, N., Ahmed, F. F., Irfan, M., Sohail, M. F., Kirmani, A. A., Project Report, N. E. D. University of Engineering & Technology, Karachi, Pakistan, 1995.

 

PLANOPT was used to optimize the layout of an existing production facility of MECHTECH Engineering Ltd. in Karachi. The director of the facility certified with the remark:" The report has made suggestions that will undoubtedly increase the efficiency and productivity of the factory and is aimed at the optimization of the overall system ”.

 

"A hybrid optimization approach for layout design of unequal-area facilities", Mir, M. Imam, M.H. , Computers & Industrial Engineering , v 39, n 1-2, Feb. 2001, p 49-63

 

The paper has presented an algorithm called HOT and compared it with PLANOPT. This paper has used two of the PLANOPT benchmark problems name L50 (50 department problem) and L100 (100 department problem). Both of these problems have randomly generated department dimensions and flow matrices. For L50, HOT produces the best layout with a cost = 80794.24 whereas VIP-PLANOPT produces the optimal layout with a cost =78224.68 and takes only one sixth of the time taken by HOT. For L100, HOT produces the best layout with a cost = 558556.2 whereas VIP-PLANOPT produces the optimal layout with a cost =550232.9 and takes only quarter of the time taken by HOT. Among all published algorithms so far, HOT comes closest to PLANOPT. However HOT is unable to beat PLANOPT. PLANOPT produces better (lower-cost) layouts and solves the problem much faster.

 

"Computer Aided Layout Optimization Model for Minimizing Traffic Volume", M.A. Saif and M.H. Imam,, in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Engineering Computational Technology , B.H.V. Topping and C.A. Mota Soares, (Editors), Civil-Comp Press, Stirling, United Kingdom, paper 49, 2004.

 

The above paper demonstrates the use of VIP-PLANOPT for optimal town-planning to minimize the traffic volume in a town. The paper reports savings of millions of miles of driving per year attributed to the use of VIP-PLANOPT.

Abstract

A novel computational approach is presented to minimize the traffic volume within a town by optimizing the town layout at the town-planning stage. The problem is formulated as a layout optimization problem of unequal area rectangular modules representing various blocks of a town. The objective function to be minimized is the 24-hour VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled). A software package called PLANOPT was found to be the only available software package suitable for this extremely hard layout optimization problem with real-world constraints. Giving complete details of the required data, it is shown that the approach is readily applicable to any real-world problem. It is found that the optimal layouts may reduce the VMT drastically saving millions of miles of driving per year.