On the unboundedness of facility layout problems

Facility layout problems involve the location of facilities in a planar arrangement such that facilities that are strongly connected to one another are close to each other and facilities that are not connected may be far from one another. Pairs of facilities that have a negative connection should be far from one another. Most solution procedures assume that the optimal arrangement is bounded and thus do not incorporate constraints on the location of facilities. However, especially when some of the coefficients are negative, it is possible that the optimal configuration is unbounded. In this paper we investigate whether the solution to the facility layout problem is bounded or not. The main Theorem is a necessary and sufficient condition for boundedness. Sufficient conditions that prove boundedness or unboundedness are also given. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2010