In this paper, we deal with the single‐row equidistant facility layout problem (SREFLP), which asks to find a one‐to‐one assignment of n facilities to n locations equally spaced along a straight line so as to minimize the sum of the products of the flows and distances between facilities. We develop a branch‐and‐bound algorithm for solving this problem. The lower bound is computed first by performing transformation of the flow matrix and then applying the well‐known Gilmore–Lawler bounding technique. The algorithm also incorporates a dominance test which allows to drastically reduce redundancy in the search process. The test is based on the use of a tabu search procedure designed to solve the SREFLP. We provide computational results for problem instances of size up to 35 facilities. For a number of instances, the optimal value of the objective function appeared to be smaller than the best value reported in the literature.
