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 modeling a large variety of applications. It has been actively researched until the mid-nineties, and then again 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, we review the literature on the SRFLP and comment on its relationship with other layout problems. We then provide an overview of different formulations of the problem that appear in the literature. We provide exact and heuristic approaches that have been used to solve SRFLPs, and also present details about the benchmark instances widely used in the literature. We finally point out research gaps and promising directions for future research on this problem.