A hierarchical approach to the facility layout problem

A hierarchical approach to the continual plane facility layout problem is presented in this paper. The approach employs a divide-and-conquer strategy which consists of three phases: (1) cluster analysis, (2) initial layout, and (3) layout refinement. Cluster analysis generates a hierarchical structure of the layout. Based on the structure, the second phase produces an initial layout of each cluster which is then refined by the layout refinement phase. The relatively small number of facilities in each cluster enables the problem formulation to embody more geometric constraints than existing methods. Cluster layouts are combined using a bottom-up merging process to generate the overall layout. The effectiveness of this procedure is demonstrated by experiments involving five to thirty facilities. Because of the hierarchical nature of this approach, it is suitable for plants with a large number of facilities which operate in tightly coupled groups.