Title: A novel two-stage approach for solving a bi-objective facility layout problem

Authors: Arash Mohamadi; Sadoullah Ebrahimnejad; Reza Tavakkoli-Moghaddam

Addresses: Young Researchers and Elite Club, South Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Alborz, Iran ' School of Industrial Engineering, School of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, P.O. Box 11155/4563, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: This paper presents a new heuristic algorithm for a facility layout problem in order to determine the entry order of departments and arrange them adjacent to each other. Additionally, another algorithm is developed to optimise the facility layout that minimises bi-objectives including the total material handling cost and dead space simultaneously. The optimised facility layout is determined by the use of three meta-heuristic algorithms, namely genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimisation (PSO) and parallel simulated annealing (SA). This can be considered as a novel two-stage approach. The arrangement of facilities obtained by this approach is compared with the results of two other methods proposed in the literature. The comparison of the results shows the superiority of the proposed algorithms as compared to previous work. Furthermore, among the three algorithms, PSO and SA resulted in better overall performance with respect to cost and running time.

Keywords: facility layout; meta-heuristic algorithms; genetic algorithm; particle swarm optimisation; PSO; parallel simulated annealing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2018.088557

International Journal of Operational Research, 2018 Vol.31 No.1, pp.49 - 87

Received: 30 Oct 2014
Accepted: 23 Mar 2015

Published online: 12 Dec 2017 *

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