Application of Firefly Metaheuristic Algorithm for the Single Row Facility Layout Problem

Facility layout is the arrangement of machines, equipments, or other resources in a manufacturing environment to designate an ideal configuration for minimizing the total cost by affecting the production flow. Layout design has a significant impact on the performance of manufacturing systems, and the layout problems are generally regarded as NP-Hard problems. In the literature, a considerable amount of attention is granted to biology-inspired metaheuristic algorithms in order to find efficient solutions to deal with many optimization problems. In this study, the general features and the mechanism of the Firefly Algorithm are presented initially. In order to illustrate how to adapt the proposed algorithm to a real manufacturing problem, a numerical application is shown for the solution of single row facility layout problem. A candidate solution array for 15 departments is obtained through the presumptions of the proposed algorithm. For a sample size of 500 iterations, 95 % confidence interval is constructed between the values of 8,306.53 and 8,378.22 with a standard error value of 18.288.