Efficient facility layout planning in a maximally planar graph model

In the domain of facility and factory layout planning, the difficult problem of finding a maximum weight planar subgraph of an edge-weighted complete graph has many important practical applications. We introduce new neighbourhood structures to generate an initial solution and yield feasible modifications of a current layout. We compare our constructive algorithm to a couple of approaches from the literature in order to receive an initial feasible solution. Moreover, a new implementation of Leung's greedy heuristic outperforms all other layout approximation algorithms in quality. Computational results demonstrate the performance characteristics.