Multi-start simulated annealing for dynamic plant layout problem

In today’s dynamic market, organizations must be adaptive to market fluctuations. In addition, studies show that material-handling cost makes up between 20 and 50 percent of the total operating cost. Therefore, this paper considers the problem of arranging and rearranging, when there are changes in product mix and demand, manufacturing facilities such that the sum of material handling and rearrangement costs is minimized. This problem is called the dynamic plant layout problem (DPLP). In this paper, the authors develop a multi-start simulated annealing for DPLP. To compare the performance of meta-heuristics, data sets taken from literature are used in the comparison.