Application of improved simulated annealing algorithm in facility layout design

The design of the facility layout is an important part of the design of a manufacturing system. Whether the facility layout is proper or not has a very important effect on the performance of the manufacturing system. But for a long time, we design the facility layout based on the subjective experiences, which leads to low efficiency and high expenses. The facility layout problem is an NP-complete one, it´s very difficult to find its optimum in the reasonable time, so heuristic algorithms have been proposed to solve the problem. Unfortunately, few heuristic algorithms can solve the facility layout problem efficiently. First, the paper analyzes the possibility of solving the facility layout problem using simulated annealing algorithm, points out that the efficiency of the traditional simulated annealing algorithm is low and its solution is not good because of its repeated searching. Then the traditional simulated annealing algorithm is improved through adding memory function in the searching process and is used to solve the facility layout problem. The improved simulated annealing algorithm can effectively avoid repeated searching, so the solution is better and the efficiency is higher, which is proved to be true through an example. The example also demonstrates that the improved simulated annealing algorithm is very useful in solving the combinatorial optimization problems such as the facility layout problem.