A simulated annealing-based approach for dynamic facility planning

A poor facility design can be costly, and may lead to poor-quality products, low employee morale and customer dissatisfaction. Typically, the facility layout is decided when the facilities are first set up. However, product variety, process improvement and technology improvement can make the original layout plan inefficient. Since the facility layout problem is a NP-hard problem, an optimal solution is difficult to obtain. This study uses a simulated annealing (SA)-based approach to solve the dynamic layout problem, considering the handling cost, the facility moving cost, and the facility setup cost.