Dynamic facility layout problem based on flexible bay structure and solving by genetic algorithm

Finding positions of departments on the plant floor for multiple periods while minimizing the sum of material handling and rearrangement costs is the base consideration of dynamic facility layout problems (DFLP). In this paper, a new kind of DFLP using flexible bay structure is studied. In a plant layout, based on flexible bay structure, departments are assigned to parallel bays in a plant floor. Departments could be free oriented and may have unequal areas as well as a mixed integer programming formulated to find optimal solutions. Due to complexity, only small-size problems could be solved in logical time while using exact methods. Therefore, a genetic algorithm (GA) was proposed to solve this optimization problem. This method was tested on some test problems of the DFLP literature. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.