A survey on multi-floor facility layout problems

Abstract

Facility layout problem is a well-known optimization problem which generally deals with the arrangement of the facilities required in an organization. This problem has received much attention during the past decades. However, the researchers have mainly focused on the case where a single floor is available. While, in the competitive world, it is clear that using multi-floor structure layouts are much more efficient and in some cases necessary due to the nature of the functions and activities performed in the firms. Hence, this issue has recently attracted much attention and is becoming increasingly popular. Nevertheless, the lack of a review study on this subject for directing the new research is a great gap that has not been regarded so far. In this paper, first a well-designed framework is presented. Then, all literature references in the field of multi-floor facility problem (MFLP) are gathered, categorized and reviewed thoroughly based on the framework. Accordingly, different applications of MFLP across various industries are discussed; basic features of the problem to capture different situations are identified; the formulation approaches to address the problems and the relevant resolution methodologies are introduced; the majority of the contributions proposed in the literature are analysed from different perspectives. Finally, several issues and research directions are highlighted to be investigated in future work.