A large-scale hybrid simulated annealing algorithm for cyclic facility layout problems

The cyclic facility layout problem (CFLP) is a special case of the dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) in which there are several production periods and the production cycle repeats itself by going to the first period after the last one because of the seasonal nature of products. In this article, a mixed integer programming formulation is developed for the CFLP. In the DFLP literature, department shapes are assumed to be given or fixed. However, this assumption does not hold in the case of the CFLP because the facility size is limited and the area requirements of the departments change significantly throughout the planning horizon. Therefore, department dimensions and sizes are considered as decision variables in the CFLP. A large-scale hybrid simulated annealing algorithm (LS-HSA) is proposed to solve the formulated problem and shown to be effective and versatile as it can be applied to various facility layout problems.