Using Pareto-Optimality for Solving Multi-Objective Unequal Area Facility Layout Problem

A lot of optimal and heuristic algorithms for solving facility layout problem (FLP) have been developed in the past few decades. The majority of these approaches adopt a problem formulation known as the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) that is particularly suitable for equal area facilities. Unequal area FLP comprises a class of extremely difficult and widely applicable optimization problems arising in many diverse areas to meet the requirements for real-world applications. Unfortunately, most of these approaches are based on a single objective. While, the real-world FLPs are multi-objective by nature. Only very recently have meta-heuristics been designed and used in multiobjective FLP. They most often use the weighted sum method to combine the different objectives and thus, inherit the well-known problems of this method. As of now, there is no formal approach published for the unequal area multi-objective FLP to consider several objectives simultaneously. This paper presents an evolutionary approach for solving multi-objective unequal area FLP using multi-objective genetic algorithm that presents the layout as a set of Pareto-optimal solutions optimizing multiple objectives simultaneously. The experimental results show that the proposed approach performs well in dealing with multi-objective unequal area FLPs which better reflects the real-world scenario.