According to [1], the material handling cost comprises about 20-50% of the total operating cost of the facility layout. Typical research on facility layout concentrate on static layout problems where from-to charts are used to evaluate the layout. These layouts are not flexible enough to accommodate any future changes in production. Research on dynamic facility layout also has used the concept ...

This paper explores a case of flexible facility layout, in which the layout process can be carried out in a dynamic manner responding to changing demands. We consider a facility such as an office building that needs to partition its interior space into units of different sizes and allocate them to different users. Facing different demands, each of which requires a different space size, the mana...

A facility layout problem is concerned with determining the best position of departments, cells, or machines on the plant. An efficient layout contributes to the overall efficiency of operations. It’s been proved that, when system characteristics change, it can cause a significant increase in material handling cost. Consequently, the efficiency of the current layout decreases or is lost and it ...

Much of the research in facility layout has focused on static layouts where the material handling flow is assumed to be constant during the planning horizon. But in today’s market-based, dynamic environment, layout rearrangement may be required during the planning horizon to maintain layout effectiveness. A few algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. They include dynamic programmin...

this article addresses a single row facility layout problem where the objective is to optimize the arrangement of some rectangular facilities with different dimensions on a line. regarding the np-hard nature of the considered problem, a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm based on simulated annealing has been proposed to obtain a near optimal solution. a number of test problems are randomly generat...