The Single Row Facility Layout Problem: State of the Art

The single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is a NP-hard problem concerned with the arrangement of facilities of given lengths on a line so as to minimize the weighted sum of the distances between all the pairs of facilities. The SRFLP and its special cases often arise while modelling a large variety of applications. It was actively researched until the mid-nineties. It has again been actively studied since 2005. Interestingly, research on many aspects of this problem is still in the initial stages, and hence the SRFLP is an interesting problem to work on. In this paper, literature review on the SRFLP and comment on its relationship with other location problems are done. An overview of the different formulations of the problem that appear in the literature is done. Exact and heuristic approaches that have been used to solve SRFLPs are provided. Research gaps and promising directions for future research on this problem are pointed out. [W.P. No. 2011-12-02]. URL:[http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/assets/snippets/workingpaperpdf/7736113342011-12-02.pdf].