An Approximate Algorithm for Solving Dynamic Facility Layout Problem

Abstract

The problem of rearranging manufacturing facilities over time is known as Dynamic Facility Layout Problem (DFLP). The objective is to minimize the sum of the material handling and the rearrangement costs. The problem is NP-hard and has begun to receive attention very recently. In this paper, an approximate algorithm/ heuristic for solving DFLP is presented. The proposed heuristics has been applied to eight different data sets of a problem set (containing 48 data sets) given by Balakrishnan and Cheng [1], and it has been found that the proposed heuristic provide good solutions having about 12% of deviation from the best known solution available in the published literature. Further, as a future scope of research work, an improvement heuristic can be developed or some meta-heuristic approach such as simulated annealing, and tabu search can be further applied to improve the solution quality obtained from the proposed approximate algorithm. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.