Development of a Layout Technique for Unequal Department Shapes and Areas

This paper presents a technique to solve the facility layout problem with rectangular departments of unequal areas. This problem can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem to minimize the total cost owing to material flow between departments. It is, however, computationally timeconsuming to find optimal solutions for large problems, because they are highly combinatorial in nature. Furthermore, these problems exhibit many local minima. These properties make them suitable candidates for the application of simulated annealing, which is a stochastic optimization procedure. A suboptimal method is then developed, which is a new improvement-type technique based on simulated annealing. In this technique, a new algorithm for updating placement of departments is proposed. This algorithm enables the application of simulated annealing to solve the problems considered here. This technique also offers increased flexibility to the optimization process, making the solution much less dependent upon the initial layout. Numerical results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented technique.