New heuristic for the dynamic layout problem

The dynamic layout problem addresses the situation where the traffic among the various units within a facility changes over time. Its objective is to determine a layout for each period in a planning horizon such that the total of the flow and the relocation costs is minimized. The problem is computationally very hard and has begun to receive attention only recently. In this paper, we present a new heuristic scheme, based on the idea of viable layouts, which is easy to operationalize. A limited computational study shows that, depending upon how it is implemented, this scheme can be reasonably fast and can yield results that are competitive with those from other available solution methods.