Facility layout problem: Bibliometric and benchmarking analysis

Facility layout problem is related to the location of departments in a facility area, with the aim of determining the most effective configuration. Researches based on different approaches have been published in the last six decades and, to prove the effectiveness of the results obtained, several instances have been developed. This paper presents a general overview on the extant literature on facility layout problems in order to identify the main research trends and propose future research questions. Firstly, in order to give the reader an overview of the literature, a bibliometric analysis is presented. Then, a clusterization of the papers referred to the main instances reported in literature was carried out in order to create a database that can be a useful tool in the benchmarking procedure for researchers that would approach this kind of problems

Comparative Performance of Tabu Search and Simulated Annealing Heuristics for the Quadratic Assignment Problem

For almost two decades the question of whether tabu search (TS) or simulated annealing (SA) performs better for the quadratic assignment problem has been unresolved. To answer this question satisfactorily, we compare performance at various values of targeted solution quality, running each heuristic at its optimal number of iterations for each target. We find that for a number of varied problem instances, SA performs better for higher quality targets while TS performs better for lower quality targets