A particle swarm optimization for the single row facility layout problem

Single Row Facility Layout Problem (SRFLP) consists of arranging a number of rectangular facilities with varying length on one side of a straight line to minimize the weighted sum of the distance between all facility pairs. In this paper we use a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to solve the SRFLP. We first employ a new coding and decoding technique to efficiently map discrete feasible space of the SRFLP to a continuous space. The proposed PSO will further use this coding technique to explore the continuous solution space. Afterwards, the algorithm decodes the solutions to its respective feasible solution in the discrete feasible space and returns the solutions. Computational results on benchmark problems show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm compared to other heuristics. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.