Combining evolutionary computation and dynamic programming for solving a dynamic facility layout problem -: Discrete optimization

This paper presents an algorithm combining dynamic programming and genetic search for solving a dynamic facility layout problem. While the quadratic assignment formulation of this problem has been deeply investigated there are very few papers solving it for departments of unequal size. We describe a model which can cope with unequal sizes, which may change from one period in time to the next. For each period a genetic algorithm evolves a population of layouts while the dynamic programming provides the evaluation of the fitness of the layouts. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.