An improved heuristic approach for multi-objective facility layout problem

Abstract

Multi-objective facility layout problem (mFLP) generates a different layout by varying objectives weights. Since the selection of objective weights in mFLP is critical, stages of designing layout having multiple objectives, the objective weights therefore play an important role in the layout design of mFLP. In practice, it is selected randomly by the layout designer based on his/her past experience that restricts the layout designing process completely designer dependent and thus the layout varies from designer to designer. This paper aims to resolve the issues of selecting the objective weight for each objective. We propose four methods to determine objective weight which makes the design process of mFLP completely designer independent.

Keywords:

• relative objective weight
• multi-objective facility layout problem
• quadratic assignment problem
• heuristic

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to put on record their appreciation to anonymous learned referees for their valuable suggestions which have substantially enhanced the quality of the paper over the previous version.