Abstract
Single Row Facility Layout Problem (SRFLP) is a permutation problem which has been widely studied in the academic field in order to improve the efficiency on production site. The main purpose of SRFLP is to find an optimal permutation of a number of rectangular facilities with given material flows between each facility, in order to obtain the minimum total cost by arranging them along a straight line. Since SRFLP has already been proven to be a NP-Complete problem, it is irrational to expect to obtain the global optimal solution by exhaustive methods, therefore the recent researches of SRFLP have therefore been adopted to heuristic algorithms in order to obtain an optimal or a near optimal solution within acceptable CPU time. In this paper, we use a novel, efficient heuristic algorithm called Simplified Swarm Optimization algorithm (SSO), with an effective local search mechanism, and other optimizational techniques to find the near-optimal solution for SRFLP within acceptable time. With a comparison to the computational results of two benchmark problem sets from the previous studies, it is shown that our proposed method has better efficiency in solving SRFLP, without sacrifice the effectiveness of the algorithm. Key