Integrated Facility Layout Design and Flow Assignment Problem Under Uncertainty

The facility layout problem is the problem of assigning facilities to locations. We study the case of limited machine capacity and hence multiple copies of each machine type. We take into account stochastic demand, described by several types of jobs (i.e., sequences of machine types), each with an uncertain demand level. We develop a heuristic framework allowing us to find good solutions to the stochastic case whenever it is possible to solve the corresponding deterministic quadratic assignment problem (QAP), exactly or heuristically. Athough the QAP is a very hard problem in its own right, our approach allows randomness (and hence relevance) to be added at only a marginal increase in computational costs.

Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2014.0599.