Title: A hybrid heuristic for the unequal-area dynamic facility layout problem

Authors: Artak Hakobyan; Alan McKendall

Addresses: Parametric Technology Corporation, 41 West Otterman Street, Suite 310, Greensburg, PA 15601, USA ' Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, West Virginia University, 325A Mineral Resources Building, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA

Abstract: The dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) is the problem of finding positions of departments on the plant floor for a multi-period planning horizon such that departments do not overlap, and the sum of the material handling and rearrangement costs is minimised. In this paper, the departments may have unequal-areas and can be placed anywhere within the boundary of the continuous plant floor. Because of the complexity of the problem, only small-size problems can be solved in reasonable time using exact methods. As a result, a hybrid heuristic, which consists of a dual simplex method and a tabu search (TS) heuristic, is developed for the DFLP, and the heuristic was tested on some instances from the literature. The results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristic.

Keywords: facilities planning; facilities design; dynamic facility layout problem; DFLP; unequal area departments; hybrid heuristics; tabu search; dual simplex; materials handling costs; rearrangement costs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMOR.2013.057492

International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, 2013 Vol.5 No.6, pp.743 - 763

Received: 19 Jul 2012
Accepted: 15 Aug 2012
Published online: 31 Mar 2014 *

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