In other words, facilities design attempts to organize the tangible fixed assets of an activity in such way as to provide maximal support for the achievement of the activity's objectives at the present time and in the future at the lowest possible cost. This activity can take many different forms, e.g. manufacturing (plant layout), health care (hospital layout), transportation (airport layout) ...

The operating theater layout problem (OTLP) in a hospital aims to determine for a set of facilities their positions and orientations on the floor-layout of departments in a hospital subject to a set of constraints on distances, available areas, and non-overlapping facilities according to international medical standards and specifications. The OTLP has two main objectives: a quantitative objecti...

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 ...

INTRODUCTION: The appropriate-use optimization of the limited spaces of the Iranian hospitals is believed to be a crucial step towards promoting the efficiency of these healthcare centers. The issue determining the optimization patterns of the layout of units has led to a lot of efforts by researchers as it increases the efficiency of the hospitals through patients’ improvement, changing the lo...

Nowadays, due to inherent complexity of real optimization problems, it has always been a challenging issue to develop a solution algorithm to these problems. Single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is a NP-hard problem of arranging a number of rectangular facilities with varying length on one side of a straight line with aim of minimizing the weighted sum of the distance between all facility...

a new powerful optimization algorithm inspired from colonizing weeds is utilized to solve the well-known quadratic assignment problem (qap) which is of application in a large number of practical areas such as plant layout, machinery layout and so on. a set of reference numerical problems from qaplib is taken in order to evaluate the efficiency of the algorithm compared with the previous ones wh...

A multi-goal layout problem may be formulated as a Quadratic Assignment model, considering multiple goals (or factors), both qualitative and quantitative in the objective function. The facilities layout problem, in general, varies from the location and layout of facilities in manufacturing plant to the location and layout of textual and graphical user interface components in the human–computer ...