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...

The aim of this research is the development of an innovative approach to support company upgrades, reorganization and new facility establishment. This approach is focused on combining layout engineering with the use of simulation and optimization; this combination is very important because allows to reorganize the whole layout and production processes and flows and to measure the results in the...

This paper presents an integrated design approach for the facility layout problem. It develops a method for the concurrent determination of the block layout, the locations of departmental input and output (I/O) points using the contour distances between the I/O points, and the material flow paths between the I/O points. Results of computational experiments show that the performance of this inte...

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has become important to distribution and logistics operations due to current mandates by Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense. In order to meet these mandates, distribution operations have to re-layout their distribution facilities to accommodate these RFID systems. This transcript describes a layout algorithm that supports optimizing the design of RFID s...

The facility layout problem is a global optimization problem that seeks to arrange a given number of rectangular facilities so as to minimize the total cost associated with the (known or projected) interactions between them. This paper is concerned with the single-row facility layout problem (SRFLP), the one-dimensional version of facility layout that is also known as the one-dimensional space ...

Given a set of departments, a number of rows and pairwise connectivities between these departments, the multi-row facility layout problem (MRFLP) looks for a non-overlapping arrangement of these departments in the rows such that the weighted sum of the center-to-center distances is minimized. As even small instances of the (MRFLP) are rather challenging, several special cases have been consider...

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...