Solving facility layout problems using evolutionary strategy based on levy flight

Abstract

This paper introduces a new way to solve the Facility Layout Problem (FLP). The FLP consists of choosing positions of a set of departments in the facility so that the material handling cost is minimized. We employed an Evolutionary Strategy (ES) using Levy Flight as basis for an improved mutation operator. We compared this algorithm with GA, ACO, Chaos Theory and standard ES in a set of FLP benchmarks. Our results show that the proposed method obtains better solutions with less evaluations for large scale problems.