Learning from Prior Designs for Facility Layout Optimization

The problem of facility layout involves not only optimizing the locations of process components on a factory floor, but in real-world applications there are numerous practical constraints and objectives that can be difficult to formulate comprehensively in an explicit optimization model. As an alternative to explicit modelling, we present an optimization approach that learns structural properties from examples of expert-designed layouts of other similar facilities, and considers similarity to the examples as one objective in a multiobjective facility layout optimization problem. We have tested the approach on small-scale artificial test data, and the initial results indicate that a layout objective can be learned from example layouts, even if the process structure in the examples differs from the target case.