An Improved Multi-goal Heuristic for Facility Layout Problems

This paper presents an improved multi-goal heuristic for facility layout design problems. The heuristic aims at the minimization of the objective function, which incorporates two factors: qualitative and quantitative. The quantitative factor involves the workflow and rectilinear distance and must be minimized, whereas, the qualitative factor represents the closeness rating and is maximized to obtain the optimal facility layout. The qualitative factor is derived from using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for greater meaning and accuracy. Also, the quantification of the qualitative factor with respect to the quantitative factor (by the usage of relative weights) is also obtained using the AHP. An improved heuristic approach is presented which considers all possible permutations of the facility layout to obtain the optimal solution.