Track: Facilities Planning and Management

Abstract

An enhanced constructive technique with improved ordering criterion is presented for solving unequal-area facility layout problems (UA-FLPs). The technique is based on modified implementation of cluster boundary search algorithm and using an ordering criterion that is a weighted combination of material handling cost between pairs of facilities and areas of individual facilities. Due to high computational efficiency of the presented technique, it is especially suited for solving very large scale unequal-area facility layout problems. Its performance is compared with published UA-FLP techniques based on Tabu Search (TS) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). It is shown that the presented technique outperforms both TS and PSO techniques. Also, for large-size layout problems it performs better than published hybrid techniques formed by integrating TS and PSO methodologies.