Designing Flexible Stochastic Dynamic Layout: An Integrated Firefly and Chaotic Simulated Annealing-Based Approach

Facility layout problem (FLP) is non-deterministic and a polynomial time problem (NP-hard). In practice, the FLP is affected due to the presence of fluctuating products demand and thus results in increased material handling cost. Such layout problems are known as stochastic dynamic facility layout problem (SDFLP). It is well known that the computational time to solve SDFLP is exponential; therefore, it is hard to solve using exact approaches. Various meta-heuristic algorithms are used for solving such problems. The aim of the paper is to formulate a novel meta-heuristic for solving SDFLP, which minimizes the material handling cost better than the prevailing meta-heuristic. A hybridized methodology of combining firefly algorithm (FA) and chaotic simulated annealing (CSA), i.e. hybrid FA/CSA is proposed and evaluated to find an optimal solution for SDFLP. The performance of the algorithm, in terms of total material handling cost, is compared with simulated annealing, chaotic simulated annealing and hybrid ant colony optimization/simulated annealing using data from the literature.