Insertion based Lin–Kernighan heuristic for single row facility layout

The single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is the problem of arranging facilities with given lengths on a line, while minimizing the weighted sum of the distances between all pairs of facilities. The problem is known to be NP‐hard. In this paper, we present a neighborhood search heuristic called LK‐INSERT which uses a Lin–Kernighan neighborhood structure built on insertion neighborhoods. To the best of our knowledge this is the first such heuristic for the SRFLP. Our computational experiments show that LK‐INSERT is competitive for most instances, and it improves the best known solutions for several large sized benchmark SRFLP instances.