Simulated annealing heuristics for the dynamic facility layout problem

In today's economy, manufacturing plants must be able to operate efficiently and respond quickly to changes in product mix and demand. Therefore, this paper considers the problem of arranging and rearranging (when there are changes between the flows of materials between departments) manufacturing facilities such that the sum of the material handling and rearrangement costs is minimized. This problem is known as the dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP). In this paper, two simulated annealing (SA) heuristics are developed for the DFLP. The first SA heuristic (SA I) is a direct adaptation of SA to the DFLP. The second SA heuristic (SA II) is the same as SA I with a look-ahead/look-back strategy added. To test the performance of the heuristics, a data set taken from the literature is used in the analysis. The results obtained show that the proposed heuristics are very effective for the dynamic facility layout problem. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.