An Efficient Algorithm for the T-Row Facility Layout Problem

Facility layout problems represent a challenge to the operations research community. These problems are closely related to real-world scenarios in industry and society, such as the design of production factories or the layout of facilities in medical centers, to name a few. These scenarios have been studied from the theoretical point of view as different optimization problems. Among them, we have studied the T-Row Facility Layout Problem, which considers a layout formed by two orthogonal rows where facilities have to be placed minimizing the material handling cost. To efficiently solve this problem we propose a Variable Neighborhood Search algorithm which is able to reach all the optimal solutions reported in the literature spending a fraction of the execution time of the previous algorithm.