An experiment with plant layout formulated as a quadratic assignment problem gave the following results: (1) The CRAFT algorithm does as well as human subjects in solving the plant layout problem; (2) CRAFT does better as problem size increases if the human subjects have no prior knowledge of...

Public-sector planning problems are typically complex, and some important planning issues cannot be captured within a mathematical programming model of a problem; such issues may be qualitative in nature, unknown, or unrevealed by decisionmakers. Furthermore, there are often numerous solutions...