Locating input and output points in facilities design - a comparison of constructive, evolutionary, and exact methods

This paper formulates and compares four new approaches to optimally locate the input and output station for each department within a facility design such that material handling costs are minimized. This problem is an NP-hard combinatorial problem with many real-life applications of considerable economic consequence. A genetic algorithm (GA) is shown to be an effective and efficient optimization method when compared to integer programming, simulated annealing, and three versions of a greedy constructive heuristic on a suite of test problems of varying size. Seeding versus random initialization of GA populations are compared.