| The facility layout dramatically influences the efficiency of material handling within a manufacturing system. In order to ensure optimal performance within a manufacturing system, the facility layout should reflect changes throughout time. However, the static facility layout problem with constant material flows between departments may not be a realistic scenario because a manufacturing facility is a dynamic system that constantly evolves. In other words, product demand constantly changes over time. As a result, the dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) considers these changes and is defined as the problem of assigning departments to locations during a multi-period planning horizon such that the sum of the material handling and rearrangement costs is minimized. In this research, tabu search heuristics and a probabilistic tabu search heuristic are developed to solve the DFLP. The proposed tabu search heuristics are a simple tabu search heuristic, a tabu search heuristic with diversification and intensification strategies, and a probabilistic tabu search heuristic. Two data sets taken from the literature are used to test the performances of the proposed heuristics. Computational experiments show that the proposed heuristics out-performed the heuristics presented in the literature with respect to solution quality and computational time. |
