Dynamic facility layout problem in footwear industry

Dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) deals with the arrangement of machines in a site as to minimize the sum of materials handling and re-layout costs by considering multi periods. The DFLP studies in the literature provide several different algorithms and utilize the well known test problems to assess their performance. However, real life applications are overlooked. The industries such as footwear and clothing are prone to seasonal demand changes. Therefore, time horizons and layout/re-layout of the machines within the facility should be studied carefully. This study considers a footwear facility and several scenarios are generated by using the real life data. A clonal selection based algorithm is proposed to solve the real life DFLP. The performance of the algorithm, further the effect of time periods on solution quality and applicability of the results are tested and promising results are obtained. (C) 2015 The Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.