Combining evolutionary computation and dynamic programming for solving a dynamic facility layout problem

This paper presents an algorithm combining dynamic programming and genetic search for solving a dynamic facility layout problem. While the quadratic assignment formulation of this problem has been deeply investigated there are very few papers solving it for departments of unequal size. We describe a model which can cope with an unequal and changing size. The genetic algorithm evolves a population of layouts for each time period while th dynamic programming provides the evaluation of the fitness ot the layouts.