Solving Facility Layout Problem via Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper targets the Facility Layout Problem (FLP), which has many practical applications and known to be NP-hard. During recent decades, a number of algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. Most of those algorithms try to solve this problem by encoding layout candidates and using combinational optimization techniques to obtain the best one among those encoded candidates. However, since there exist layouts which cannot be represented by those encoding techniques, there is possibility of missing the searching opportunity for the optimal solution. To overcome this problem, this paper is concerned with the development of algorithm to solve FLP by searching continuously optimal coordinate of each department. In particular, this paper proposes an algorithm solving FLP via Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), which is known to be effective for many types of continuous optimization problem.