Supriya R. Ingole, Dinesh Singh

Abstract

Facility layout is an optimum arrangement or allocation of different types of industrial facilities, such as processing and operating devices, machineries, material handling equipments, furniture, storage spaces, various sections/departments, etc. In facility layout planning, the interdepartmental material flow is usually large enough and thereby the relative placement of the departments is an important problem, which is solved properly might result in huge savings in material handling cost or layout cost. In this paper, particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is attempted to solve two equal area facility layout problems. The objective is to minimize the total material handling cost and to get the optimal facility layout. The computational results verify the efficiency of PSO in finding optimal solutions and the results are compared.

Keywords- Facility layout, Particle Swarm Optimization, Quadratic Assignment Problem.