An improved pair-wise exchange heuristic for the dynamic plant layout problem

Much of the research in facility layout has focused on static layouts where the material handling flow is assumed to be constant during the planning horizon. But in today's market-based, dynamic environment, layout rearrangement may be required during the planning horizon to maintain layout effectiveness. A few algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. They include dynamic programming and pair-wise exchange. In this paper we propose an improved dynamic pair-wise exchange heuristic based on a previous method published in this journal. Tests show that the proposed method is effective and efficient.