An improved fireworks algorithm for the constrained single-row facility layout problem

Abstract

The single-row facility layout problem (SRFLP) decides upon the arrangement of facilities in a straight row so as to minimise the material handling cost. Generally, this problem allows the placement of the facilities in any location in any order without any restriction, but some practical SRFLP cases are required to meet various types of constraints imposed on the placement of its facilities in the engineering of the placement of factory machinery and equipment. According to this new perspective, we studied the constrained SRFLP (cSRFLP) in this paper. In this problem, a few facilities need to be placed in certain positions or specified orders with or without the requirement to be located next to each other. To address this novel layout problem, related constraints are defined and classified, and novel mixed-integer programming models for the problem are formulated. Subsequently, the CPLEX software is employed to solve this problem. Then a constrained improved fireworks algorithm is presented, which is discretised to solve the considered cSRFLP. Our computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs better than the existing algorithms in solving the problem.

Keywords:

• constrained single-row facility layout problem
• fireworks algorithm
• mixed-integer programming model
• facility layout design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Silu Liu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8477-8327

Zeqiang Zhang http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8781-3618

Chao Guan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5019-9730

Lixia Zhu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3524-3072

Peng Guo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5520-7701

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (numbers 51205328, 51675450), the Youth Foundation for Humanities, Social Sciences of Ministry of Education of China (number 18YJC630255), and Sichuan Science and Technology Program (number 2019YFG0285).