LARGE-SCALE LAYOUT OF FACILITIES USING A HEURISTIC HYBRID ALGORITHM

In this article the layout of facilities is formulated as a quadratic assignment problem and then investigated using a heuristic hybrid algorithm. The algorithm presented is a hybrid in the sense that it incorporates the short-term memory aspects of tabu search and the probabilistic aspects of simulated annealing. When applied to some large-scale problems the hybrid algorithm produces results superior to the equivalent tabu search algorithm in both solution quality and execution time. Furthermore, for a particular standard problem, the mean solution quality obtained using the hybrid algorithm compares favorably with the best individual value known to date. Hence, the hybrid algorithm is shown to be an effective computational technique for solving large-scale facilities layout problems.