A Simulated Annealing Algorithm with a Dynamic Temperature Schedule for the Cyclic Facility Layout Problem

In this paper, an unequal area Cyclic Facility Layout Problem (CFLP) is studied. Dynamic and seasonal nature of the product demands results in the necessity for considering the CFLP where product demands as well as the departmental area requirements are changing from one period to the next one. Since the CFLP is NP-hard, we propose a Simulated Annealing (SA) metaheuristic with a dynamic temperature schedule to solve the CFLP. In the SA algorithm, both relative department locations and dimensions of departments are simultaneously determined. We benchmark the performance of the proposed SA algorithm with earlier approaches on different test problems from the literature and find out that the SA algorithm is promising.