A new data structure of solution representation in hybrid ant colony optimization for large dynamic facility layout problems

A dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) is concerned with finding a set of facility layouts across multiple time periods that minimizes the total cost of material flows and rearrangement costs. Unlike other heuristic approaches that focus mainly on the searching aspect, this research takes another approach by streamlining the data structure of solution representation to improve the solution swapping and storing activities within a meta‐heuristic framework. The experimental results from testing the data encoding and decoding schemes on a DFLP data set have been quite promising in terms of solution quality and computational time.