Solving the facility layout problem using progressive modelling

This paper presents a new modeling approach called Progressive Modeling (PM) and demonstrates it by solving the Unequal Areas Facility Layout Problem (UA-FLP). A problem solution is represented by a binary tree and an objective graph. PM introduces a component model to deploy the problem logic and its solution algorithm over several interacting components. Component models isolates the objective space frdsom the search space in a black-box fashion. A novel solution algoithm is presented to demonstrate how the search process is managed and controlled while searching for optimal or near optimal solutions. The solution process and the optimization algorithm are demonstrated using the developed software framework. A set of well-known problems in the literature are reported and solved. The developed problem analysis, solution algorithm, and results demonstrate why the proposed modeling approach is promising and capable of handling more complex real-world problems.