A new hybrid tabu-simulated annealing heuristic for the dynamic facility layout problem

In today's market conditions of increasing global competition, rapid changes in technology and shorter life cycle of product, it is required to evaluate the facility layout as the dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP). The objective of the DFLP is to determine layouts for each period in the planning horizon such that the sum of material handling and rearrangement costs are minimised. In the literature several researchers proposed new algorithms and models to solve the problem. The purpose of this research is to present a new hybrid heuristic based on the simulated annealing (SA) approach supplemented with a tabu list for the DFLP. We call this heuristic TABUSA. The efficiency of the TABUSA algorithm is analysed by solving the problems in a well known data set from the literature. We have also solved the same problems by using a pure SA algorithm, and a pure tabu search (TS) algorithm for comparison purposes. The results show the effectiveness of the TABUSA algorithm.