Path relinking strategies for the bi-objective double floor corridor allocation problem

Abstract

The bi-objective Double Floor Corridor Allocation Problem is an operational research problem with the goal of finding the best arrangement of facilities in a layout with two corridors located in two floors, in order to minimize the material handling costs and the corridor length. In this paper, we present a novel approach based on a combination of Path Relinking strategies. To this aim, we propose two greedy algorithms to produce an initial set of non-dominated solutions. In a first stage, we apply an Interior Path Relinking with the aim of improving this set and, in the second stage, apply an Exterior Path Relinking to reach solutions that are unreachable in the first stage. Our extensive experimental analysis shows that our method, after automatic parameter optimization, completely dominates the previous benchmarks, spending shorter computation times. In addition, we provide detailed results for the new instances, including standard metrics for multi-objective problems.