An experimental comparison of systematic placement procedures for facility layout design

A comparision of alternative procedures for automatic placement of facilities in a layout is presented. Various placement procedures are reviewed, incorporated in an existing ‘construction’ type heuristic, and evaluated in terms of placement computation time, satisfaction of goals expressed using linguistic patterns, fulfilment of desired adjacency of facilities and regularity of shapes of facilities in resulting layouts. An experiment illustrates the application of various placement procedures for a set of randomly generated and known layout problems to compare the performance of alternative placement procedures.