Title: Metaheuristic in facility layout problems: current trend and future direction

Authors: Anirban Kundu; Pranab K. Dan

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110 016, India ' Industrial Engineering and Management, West Bengal University of Technology, BF-142, Salt Lake City, Sector-I, Kolkata 700064, India

Abstract: A state-of-the-art review, spanning the last two decades, on application of metaheuristic methods in facility layout problems (FLPs) to gauge the current and emerging trends involving new design objectives, algorithms and methodologies to the combinatorial optimisation aspects is presented in this work. Fresh developments in emerging layout research, as analysed in this study, provide a perspective on what the future of the field will be like. A tendency of using metaheuristics, such as genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), ant colony optimisation (ACO) and particle swarm optimisation (PSO) with a trend towards multi-objective approaches to layout and material handling system design is observed.

Keywords: facility layout; layout design; metaheuristics; methodology grouping; soft computing; genetic algorithms; simulated annealing; tabu search; ant colony optimisation; ACO; particle swarm optimisation; PSO.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2012.045182

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2012 Vol.10 No.2, pp.238 - 253

Published online: 20 Dec 2014 *

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