Facility Layout Planning of Central Kitchen in Food Service Industry: Application to the Real-Scale Problem

Central kitchen is a food producing factory to improve productivity in the food-service industry, to pursue scale-merit by aggregation of tasks in multiple stores into one place. However, the central kitchen is still labor intensive production environment because of tradeoff between quality and quantity of products, so that the handicraft of skilled workers cannot be eliminated. In addition, there are many parttime workers as well as full-time ones, as a result, operators can be also uncertain factors. Furthermore, customer demand forecast is also difficult according to not only susceptible to weather and seasonal variation but also influence from irregular events held around the restaurant. Due to such characteristics of the food service industry, it is also difficult to plan proper facility layout of the central kitchen to achieve both optimality and adaptability to the complexity. In this study, a new facility layout planning method of the central kitchen is proposed, where not only optimization but simulation is also adopted; flow of workers as well as products can be considered simultaneously. Computer experiments in which the proposed method is applied to the real-scale problem are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.