Facility Layout Planning and Design

The Facility Layout Problem (FLP) is a well researched problem. Locating facilities in a given space is a common problem encountered in the manufacturing industries. FLP is formulated as the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) which is proved to be NP-hard. If the layout is fixed over the period of time it is referred as a Static Facility Layout Problem (SFLP) else a Dynamic facility Layout Problem (DFLP). Nowadays, the results achieved by applying the best existing exact algorithms are modest: generally instances of sizes larger than 20 can not be solved optimally in a reasonable time. Thus, the interest lies in the application of heuristic and meta-heuristic methods to solve large instances of SFLP and DFLP. This book, therefore, provides new heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches to solve SFLP and DFLP in a reasonably less computational time. Heuristics and Meta-heuristics given in the book are tested on various instances taken from literature and it is found that these heuristics provides better solution. This book should help those who are working in the layout/location problems or anyone who are working on combinatorial optimization problems.