Two-stage Tabu — Particle swarm algorithms for the facility layout problem with size constraints

The Facility Layout Problem (FLP) in this paper is an extension of the traditional Quadratic Assignment Problems (QAP). While the objective is still to minimize the summed cost of the (flow * distance), the facilities in the FLP have different given sizes and their locations must be determined on a continual planar site. Based on the visual facility layout design system proposed by Chiang, this paper presents a study on using Tabu Search (TS), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and their combinations (TS+PSO and PSO+TS) to tackle the FLP. The computation results show that the two-stage algorithms are able to achieve better results in most cases than TS and PSO individually on the FLP. The proposed two-stage algorithms and visual layout design system provide an effective tool to solve the practical FLP.