Solving the Single Row Facility Layout Problem by Differential Evolution

Differential evolution is an efficient evolutionary optimization paradigm that has shown a good ability to solve a variety of practical problems, including combinatorial optimization ones. Single row facility layout problem is an NP-hard permutation problem often found in facility design, factory construction, production optimization, and other areas. Real-world problems can be cast as large single row facility location problem instances with different high-level properties and efficient algorithms that can solve them efficiently are needed. In this work, the differential evolution is used to solve the single row facility location problem and the ability of three different variants of the algorithm to evolve solutions to various problem instances is studied.