Shaping algorithms for facility layout problems

Abstract

There are various algorithms for the facility layout problems. Although many of them give good layouts in the aspect of objective value (usually total transportation distance), they have the problem of having facilities with irregular shape in their final layouts. We suggest four algorithms to solve this problem. If a block layout having facilities with irregular shapes is given, the suggested methods convert the given block layout into a new block layout having facilities with regular shapes. The suggested methods examine the borderlines or centroids of the facilities in given block layout and construct a new block layout on a continual plane, while keeping the relative positions of the facilities of the given block layout as closely as possible. Beam search is employed for one of them. Results of computational experiments show that all four methods construct the block layout having facilities with regular shapes without significant changes of the objective value.