Solving real-world facility layout problems using GA with Levy Flights and multi-decoding

Abstract

In this paper, we formulate a real-world Facility Layout Problem as a constraint satisfaction problem and propose a new method with a genetic algorithm. The created layout should reflect the desires of the users of the facility such as individuality, intuition, comfortableness, and convenience. We employed a GA using Levy Flights as basis for an improved mutation operator and used an island model GA with different decoding methods for each island. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.