Layout design of multi-bay facilities with limited bay flexibility

This paper addresses the facility layout problem in multibay environments, where the bays are connected at one or both ends by an inter-bay material handling system. In particular, the addition of bay width flexibility in determining efficient layouts is analyzed. A two-stage solution procedure is used to solve the inter-bay and then intea-bay configuration problems. Computational results using mixed-integer programming and an evolutionary algorithm incorporating local search are presented for various test problems.