An efficient tabu algorithm for solving the single row facility layout problem

Single-Row Facility Layout Problem (SRFLP) is a special class of facility layout problems, consists of finding an optimal linear placement of rectangular facilities with varying dimensions on a straight line. In this research, we first present a theorem to find the optimal solution of a special case of SRFLP. The results obtained by this theorem are very useful in reducing the computational efforts when, later on, a new algorithm based on tabu search is presented for SRFLP. Computational results of the proposed algorithm on benchmark problems show the efficiency of the algorithm compared to the other heuristics. The proposed algorithm can easily find near-optimal solutions in less than one minute for instances consist of 200 departments. However, the largest instances reported to be solved by the other methods had only 80 departments and took more than 10 hours to reach the solution.