A HEURISTIC FOR THE DYNAMIC FACILITY LAYOUT PROBLEM

Abstract

This paper presents a heuristic for the dynamic facility layout problem. All existing methods for solving this problem require the use of a dynamic programming model, the optimal solution of the quadratic assignment problem, or both. The proposed heuristic is based on the steepest-descent pairwise-interchange procedure to develop layouts utilizing material handling cost data from varying lengths of forecast windows as well as the explicit consideration of the corresponding rearrangement costs. Numeric results indicate that it typically performs as well as any existing methodology and only slightly worse than optimal.