Analysis of the relationship between control strategy, layout complexity and performance in facility logistics

Today, companies are faced with global markets, shorter product life cycles, and a trend towards more individualized products. This increases both the performance requirements and the complexity of material flow systems. Thus, the development of improved control strategies seems promising. Various approaches are proposed in the literature, e.g. bio-analogous strategies like swarm intelligence or ant algorithms. Conceptually, the performance of all possible strategies is located in a space defined by a hypothetical 'best possible' and a 'worst reasonable' strategy. This concept is developed for facility logistics. The dependency of throughput time and capacity utilization on layout and throughput is investigated for both strategies for a scalable generic test system. Implications for the importance of quality of the control strategy depending on complexity and performance are discussed and directions for further research are provided.