Multi‐floor dynamic facility layout: a simulated annealing‐based solution

Today's consumer market demands that manufacturing companies be competitive. Every manufacturing company wants to prevail over the uncertainties of the demand. Being able to meet the demand determines the success of a manufacturing company. A company can look for improvements in planning, manufacturing, distributing, marketing as well as other areas. Within a manufacturing system, the facility layout is one of the most appropriate criteria to reduce costs. Dynamic facility layout, as a problem that considers the flow changes between departments with time, can be extended and used for this problem. In this paper, with consideration of changes in material flow data over time, a mathematical model to formulate the multi‐floor dynamic facility layout problem is developed and to solve this model, a simulated annealing‐based solution method is proposed. Consideration of dynamic concept and capacity constraint for elevators leads to more compatible model with real world.