An oscillation based simulated annealing algorithm for the single row facility layout problem

The single row facility layout problem aims to position a set of facilities of given lengths on a single line so as to minimize the weighted sum of the distances between all the pairs of facilities, which has wide real-world applications in planning areas. In this paper, we propose an oscillation based simulated annealing algorithm for solving the single row facility layout problem. Our algorithm dynamically oscillates between two simulated annealing algorithms. One employs an exponential descent insertion strategy to capture effective movements, which increases the search efficiency, while the other adopts a radius-constrained neighborhood structure to reduce search space, which significantly enhances the intensification of the search. Besides, a new fast incremental evaluation method based on decomposition and recombination is adopted to speed up the search. Experiments on 110 instances demonstrate the competitiveness of our algorithm. In specific, for all the 110 instances, our algorithm discovers new upper bounds in 32 cases and matches the best known results for other 75 instances, only remaining 3 worse results.