FRACTAL OFFICE LAYOUTS CONSIDERING ERGONOMICS
Abstract
A number of studies in literature focus on seated workers and investigate physical workload, related back/neck pain, environmental ergonomics such as illumination, thermal comfort, cooperation, and work organization. Although, the positioning of furniture and related units may directly or indirectly influence the performance of workers, up-to best knowledge, the office layout problem is not studied in detail. Therefore, this study aims to illustrate how fractal layout concept can be adapted for cell type office layouts. The study is novel because, the constraints of a basic mathematical model that is originally defined for unequal area facility layout problem is redefined as to meet the ergonomic requirements and generate a layout. Proposed approach is used to solve the office layout problem in a university department. It is concluded that the layout obtained by considering the closeness ratings defined by office employees along with the redefined constraints outperforms the current layout.
Keywords
office ergonomics,cellular layout,mixed integer programming,fractal layout
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