Extensions to STaTS for practical applications of the facility layout problem

We consider a very general case of the facility layout problem, which allows incorporating various aspects appearing in real life applications. These aspects include loose requirements on facilities' footprints, each of which only needs to be of rectangular shape and can optionally be restricted concerning the surface area or the aspect ratio. Compared to former approaches other generalizations of practical relevance are multiple, not necessarily rectangular workshops, exclusion zones in workshops, predefined positions of facilities, the consideration of aisles, and the adherence of further restrictions such as the enforced placement of certain facilities next to an exterior wall or a minimum distance between certain pairs of facilities. Although different objectives could be applied, we especially focus on the most relevant one in practice, the minimization of transportation costs. We show that this problem can heuristically be solved using an extension of the Slicing Tree and Tabu Search (STaTS) based approach. The application of this algorithm on practical data shows its effectiveness. The paper concludes with a step-by-step guide for the application of STaTS in practice.