A Two-Level Facility Layout Design Method with the Consideration of High-Risk Facilities in Chemical Industries

Understanding facility layout design in chemical industries requires multi-disciplinary knowledge and experience. The recent work mainly focuses on improving safety and calculating the efficiency of the design. However, in chemical industries, facilities are always located in frames, so both facility layout and frame layout should be considered in the design, as well as safety. Such a situation has not been well studied. In this work, facilities are divided into several frames and then placed in a fixed area. The risk resources located in the frames and out of the frames are both contained, and the safety distances are compliant with relative regulations. Optimization and some heuristic rules are applied to obtain the layout of each frame and the whole plant. Moreover, fire embankments are considered to achieve a more realistic and reasonable final layout. As a result, compared with the initial one, the actual and potential safety factors and the reasonable degree of the factory layout are both improved. The total costs are reduced by 7.38 × 104 $·a−1. Through these steps, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is proven.