A non-greedy systematic neighbourhood search heuristic for solving facility layout problem

This paper presents a new heuristic for solving a facility layout problem. The proposed heuristic works on the non-greedy systematic pairwise exchange of two facilities, that is 2-exchange neighbourhood search based on non-greedy strategy. The proposed heuristic is applied on a large number of test problems provided by different authors in the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) library (Burkard, Karisch, Rendl, J Glob Optim 10(1):391-403, 1997) with problem size ranging from 12 to 256. Out of the 135 test problems available in the QAP library, the proposed heuristic reached optimal solutions for 64 test problems and matched the best known available solution for the other 15 test problems. For the remaining 56 test problems, the proposed approach reports highly encouraging solutions for 44 test problems (within the 2 % of deviation from the optimal/best known solutions), and for the remaining 12 problems, the proposed approach provides fair solution in reasonable time. Comparison with other meta-heuristic approaches (Ro-TS, RE-TS, GEN and SA) shows the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic.