An improved heuristic for a machine layout design problem

The problem of the location of machines in a production plant is of practical importance in modern manufacturing environments. A new procedure, referred to as edge-interchange, for replacing edges of the maximal planar graph is presented. Cases of this operation are discussed. This procedure is then used to develop a graph theoretic improvement process for solving a machine layout problem. The method can be employed to improve solutions for an initial maximal planar graph generated from construction heuristics. A computational experiment is reported for benchmark test problems of different sizes and compared with the existing heuristic. The proposed algorithm performs well in terms of solution quality and computational time.