A new heuristic procedure for the single-row facility layout problem

This paper is concerned with the single-row facility layout problem arising in Flexible Manufacturing Systems. We describe an iterative construction procedure such that the total time required by material handling systems to transport the part types between machines, is minimized. At the first stage, the procedure uses the particular structure of the problem to construct an initial feasible layout. For the next stages, it exploits the current feasible layout to construct another layout, that should be better than the previous layout. The proposed procedure is compared with existing methods for two sets of problems from the literature and is shown to be better.