A MOEA/D based approach for solving robust double row layout problem

In this paper, we propose a robust double row layout problem (RDRLP), where the material flow between any two machines may vary in different periods. A MOEA/D based solution approach is proposed to solve it. First, MOEA/D is used to find a collection of non-dominated machine sequences. Then, for each found machine sequence, MOEA/D is used to produce a set of non-dominated solutions. Finally, the final set of Pareto solutions is constructed from all the produced non-dominated solutions. The crowding-distance calculation is added to the procedure of updating the elite population to make non-dominated solutions distributed uniformly. An integer coding and a real-valued coding with their corresponding crossover and mutation operators are presented. This approach is applied to a number of problem instances with 10–35 facilities and 3–5 periods. Experimental results show that the approach is able to effectively solve this problem.