Solving unequal area static facility layout problems by using a modified genetic algorithm

Finding locations or positions of machines, cells, facilities, or departments in a workspace is categorized as a facility design problem. This article has investigated unequal-area facility layout problems in order to minimize the sum of the material handling costs. In addition, the areas and shapes of departments were fixed throughout the time horizon and during the iteration of an algorithm. Exact methods could not solve facility layout problems within a reasonable computational time when the number of departments increases due to their complexity. Therefore, a modified genetic algorithm was suggested to solve the problems. The proposed method was tested by using some problem instances chosen from the literature. Local search method and swapping method were used in order to improve the quality of layouts. In accordance with the results, the proposed modified genetic algorithm has created encouraging layouts in contrast to other methods.