1 Introduction This paper addresses the facility layout problem (FLP) with unequal areas, where a certain number of departments of specified areas has to be allocated on a given rectangular region with fixed dimensions. Since the facility layout and the material handling design have an important influence on the operating costs, minimizing the material handling costs is critical for the facility layout planner. Whereas the problem with equal areas can be modeled easily as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP), this does not hold for the problem with unequal areas. Hereby, the centroids are critical to calculate the distance between areas. Unfortunately, the centroids depend on the exact configuration selected and therefore, corresponding QAP formulations are less tractable than their equal-area counterparts [8].
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