FACOPT: a user friendly FACility layout OPTimization system

The facility layout problem is a well-researched one. However, few effective and user friendly approaches have been proposed. Since it is an NP hard problem, various optimization approaches for small problems and heuristic approaches for the larger problems have been proposed. For the most part the more effective algorithms are not user friendly. On the other hand, user-friendly methods have not been effective in handling the intricacies such as unequal department sizes. In this research, we present FACOPT, a heuristic approach that is effective and user friendly. The software uses two methods, simulated annealing and genetic algorithm to solve the facility layout problem. Computational tests are also done to identify good parameter values and to compare the performance of the two algorithms.