A comparative study of single-phase and two-phase approaches for the layout problem with material handling costs

A comparative study of one- and two-phase procedures for material handling cost-based layout problems is presented. A cost function that explicitly accounts for heterogeneous material handling equipment is used as the objective criterion and simulated annealing based search procedures are used to determine layout solutions. Simulated annealing is applied directly in the one-phase procedure and augmented with volume distance based clustering of work centres in the two-phase procedure to reduce computational complexity. The performance of the two approaches are tested on 180 sample problems with 40 work centres that differ in terms of material flow matrix density, work centre space requirements, and variation in the distribution of material flow matrix elements. The results indicate that complexity reduction techniques using surrogate objectives based on volume distance might not always result in layouts that reduce material handling cost.