A spring-embedding approach for the facility layout problem

The facility layout problem is concerned with finding the most efficient arrangement of a given number of departments with unequal area requirements within a facility. The facility layout problem is a hard problem, and therefore, exact solution methods are only feasible for small or greatly restricted problems. In this paper, we propose a spring-embedding approach that unlike previous approaches results in a model that is convex. Numerical results demonstrating the potential of our model and the efficiency of our solution procedure are presented.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: JORS
• Authors: I. Castillo, T. Sim
• Keywords: Facility Layout Problem, Hard Problem, JORS 2010, Unequal Area Requirements