A SULE'S METHOD INITIATED GENETIC ALGORITHM FOR SOLVING QAP FORMULATION IN FACILITY LAYOUT DESIGN: A REAL WORLD APPLICATION

This article considers the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) as one of the most important issues in optimization. This NP-hard problem has been largely studied in the scientific literature, and exact and approximate (heuristic and meta-heuristic) approaches have been used, mainly to optimize one or more objectives. However, most of these studies do not consider or are not tested in real applications. Hence, in this work, the authors propose the use of Sule's Method and genetic algorithms, for a QAP (stated as a facility Layout Problem) in a real industry application in Colombia so that the total cost to move the required material between the facilities is minimized. As far as the authors know, this is the first work in which Sule's Method and genetic algorithms are used simultaneously for this combinatorial optimization problem. Additionally, the proposed approach was tested using well-known datasets from the literature in order to assure its efficiency.