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

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.