Solving Facility Layout Problem - continuous simulated annealing-

This paper deals with the Facility Layout Problem (FLP), which has many practical applications in the design of logistics systems. In most of previous researches, FLP has been solved by encoding layouts to represent it as combinational optimization problem and applying meta-heuristics to solve it. However, since FLP is continuous optimization problem in nature, there exist layouts which cannot be represented by those encoding techniques. Therefore, there is possibility for those approaches to miss the searching opportunity for the optimal solution. To overcome this difficulty, this paper proposes to solve FLP as continuous optimization problem by applying Simulated Annealing.