A new model for robust facility layout problem

The Facility Layout Problem (FLP) is the problem of locating each department in a long plant floor without any overlap between departments in order to minimize the material handling cost. The main purpose of this study is to show the effectiveness of a robust approach to solve FLP.In this study, it is assumed that the departments’ length and width are not predetermined. For modeling this kind of uncertainty, the size of each department is considered as a bounded variable and two new parameters are also introduced to implement a robust approach. Moreover, a new adaptive algorithm is designed to determine the robust layout with respect to the decision makers’ requirements. Furthermore, the lower and upper bounds of objective function are obtained in this model. Due to the complexity of the problem, a set of problems is generated and tested by the proposed algorithm. The results show the efficiency of our model.