| Layout design has been studied for more than three decades. It is a very practical problem in that industry has relied, and will continue to rely, on good layout design to reduce production costs and improve facility efficiency.; The static facility layout problem (SFLP) is concerned with generating a single block layout with the total flow cost as low as possible. The dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) is concerned with generating a string of layouts, one for each period in the planning horizon, such that the total discounted flow and department relocation cost is as low as possible. Unless some restrictive assumptions are made, both SFLP and DFLP are very difficult to solve optimally. Therefore, heuristic algorithms are often developed.; In this dissertation, we first used directed graphs and simulated annealing to develop a heuristic algorithm for solving mixed-integer-programming (MIP) based SFLP. Next, we took advantage of MIP to enhance our algorithm, making it capable of handling some common requirements in real-world layout design. Then, a new MIP-based DFLP was proposed which suggested that the department relocation costs remain almost the same regardless the area or distance change. Based on the enhanced algorithm for SFLP, a heuristic algorithm for the new DFLP was obtained. The successful development of such an algorithm for DFLP was the ultimate goal of our research.; The effectiveness of our algorithms were demonstrated in three ways. First, we compared our solutions with optimal solutions to small SFLPs and DFLPs. Second. we compared our algorithms with other algorithms on a number of SFLPs chosen from the literature. And third. some problems were created to test our algorithm for DFLP. Most of the time, our algorithms for SFLP significantly outperformed others, and our algorithm for the new DFLP obtained reasonably good solutions. |
