Hybrid optimisation method for the facility layout problem

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 production flows while minimizing the total cost. The FLP arises in many industry cases, such as facility reorganization, construction of new production units, or equipment assignment. To solve this problem, we develop an ant colony optimization algorithm combined with a local search method. This chapter presents the algorithm, its performance evaluation et application to an industrial case. The remainder of this chapter is organised as follows: In section 2, the layout problem is described. In section 3, we present the general framework of the ACO algorithm and its enhancement by guided local search. Computational results on the performance evaluation of the algorithm using a set of benchmark instances are presented in section 4, and the application of the algorithm to an industrial case is reported in section 5. In section 6, we conclude this chapter with some remarks.