A new heuristic approach for solving facility layout problem

Abstract

This paper proposes a new heuristic approach for solving facility layout problem (FLP) which is traditionally formulated as quadratic assignment problem (QAP). In this paper, FLP is formulated as linear assignment problem (LAP) consisting of facility pair and location pair. Being linear in nature LAP can be solved efficiently. Solution of LAP provides lower bound on corresponding QAP formulation of FLP. Heuristic procedure is applied to solve FLP from sets of LAP solution. Proposed heuristic is tested on benchmark instances taken from literature and compared with other heuristics available in literature. Computational results show that proposed heuristic provides a good quality approximate solution. This solution can be taken as initial solution for any improvement heuristic to get optimal/near optimal solution for FLP.