A heuristic procedure for the single-row facility layout problem

The single-row facility layout problem arises when assigning service rooms along a corridor, storing files on the cylinders of a disk, and in flexible manufacturing systems where the efficiency of automated guided vehicles forces the layout to be linear. This paper describes a constructuve heuristic which provides solutions to the single-row facility layout problem so as to minimize the materials handling cost. The heuristic assigns the facilities with the largest number of moves between them to adjacent locations on the line. The heuristic differs from earlier algorithms since at any stage of the process, more than two facilities can be added to the solution sequence. The performance of the heuristic is compared with other methods proposed for the single-row facility layout problem. Results show that the heuristic performs well in terms of computational efficiency and solution quality.