ABSTRACT

This paper performs the numerical stability analysis for the application of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to the Facility Layout Problem (FLP). FLP has many practical applications and a number of algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. Most of those algorithms try to solve this problem by encoding layout candidates and using combinational optimization techniques to obtain the best one among those encoded candidates. However, since there exist layouts which cannot be represented by those encoding techniques, there is possibility of missing the searching opportunity for the optimal solution. As one approach to overcome this problem, this paper is concerned with the development of algorithm to solve FLP by PSO, so that it can search continuously optimal coordinate of each department. In particular, this paper attempts to discover the effects of the parameter settings on the convergence performance of particles in PSO applied to FLP.