Parallel hybrid BBO-TS algorithm for QAP-formulation of FLP

Abstract

This paper deals with the facility layout problem (FLP) in manufacturing systems, the main purpose of the paper is to solve the static facility layout problem as a quadratic assignment problem QAP using approximated approaches. We present Bio-geography Based Optimization meta-heuristic BBO and a parallel hybrid BBO with tabu search PBBO-TS algorithm to solve the facility layout problem. Parallel computing is implemented to diversify the search, to increase the performance of BBO algorithm, and to accelerate the speed of the running time. The proposed approaches were tested on QAPLIB benchmark instances and compared with some of the best performing sequential and parallel algorithms in the literature. The comparisons prove that the proposed algorithm PBBO-TS produce satisfactory results. In addition, the performance of the parallel implementation of the program is studied in terms of speedup and efficiency; the obtained results show that the parallel implemented system is scalable.