A simulated annealing optimization algorithm for equal and un-equal area construction site layout problem

Construction Site Layout Planning (CSLP) is an important problem because of its impact on time, cost, productivity, and safety of the projects. In this paper, CSLP is formulated by the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). At first, two case studies including equal and unequal area facilities are solved by the simulated annealing optimization algorithm. Then, the obtained results are compared with the other papers. The comparisons show that the proposed Simulated Annealing (SA) is as efficient as ACO, PSO, CBO, ECBO, WOA, WOACBO, and ACOPA which have been proposed by other papers for the same problems. As a result, the comparisons show that SA is as capable as other metaheuristics of solving the combinatorial optimization problems like CSLP, while the hardware properties and computational times have been compared. Besides the comparisons, the design of experiments shows the relationship between each SA parameter and the computational time of the algorithm. Also, the history of convergence of the proposed SA indicates the high speed of reaching the optimal solution and the artificial intelligence of the proposed SA.