This is a preliminary study in which we use a genetic algorithm (GA) to breed normalized postfix expressions for solving the facility layout problem (FLP). Our technique, initially developed for VLSI floorplanning, simultaneously places rectangles onto a planar site and optimizes area utilization by altering the shapes of facilities that have fixed area but flexible height and width dimensions....

The Single Row Facility Layout Problem (SRFLP) is the NP -hard problem of arranging facilities on a line, while minimizing a weighted sum of the distances between facility pairs. In this paper, a detailed polyhedral study of the SRFLP is performed, and several huge classes of valid and facet-inducing inequalities are derived. Some separation heuristics are presented, along with a primal heurist...

In this paper an improved tabu search (ITS) based approach is proposed for solving facility layout problem (FLP) which is formulated as quadratic assignment problem (QAP). ITS is an improved version of conventional tabu search technique which incorporates three levels viz. intensification, reconstruction, and solution acceptance. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed ITS, it is tested for be...

Due to increased competition, the manufacturers are brought to quickly respond to the needs of customers for on-time delivery of high quality products. Many studies have been made to realize these objectives such as he studies on the facility layout problem (FLP). It is to find a good configuration of the machines, equipments or other resources in a given facility in order to optimize the produ...

The facility layout problem has generally been formulated as a quadratic assignment problem, where the interacting facilities are assigned to the various sites. In this paper a different approach, based on assigning distances between pairs of sites to pairs of facilities, is taken. A network formulation and analysis of this problem is provided. An algorithm, composed of three phases, is develop...

In today’s economy, manufacturing plants must be able to operate efficiently and respond quickly to changes in product mix and demand. Therefore, this paper considers the problem of arranging and rearranging (when there are changes between the flows of materials between departments) manufacturing facilities such that sum of the material handling and rearrangement costs are minimized. This probl...

The unequal-areas facility layout problem is concerned with finding the optimal arrangement of a given number of non-overlapping indivisible departments with unequal area requirements within a facility. We present an improved optimization-based framework for efficiently finding competitive solutions for this problem. The framework is based on the combination of two mathematical optimization mod...