Abstract: Facility layout problem mainly studies the layouts of manufacturing facilities, which aims at reducing the material handling costs in the plant. An effective facility layout method can contribute to improve the overall operation efficiencies during the process of manufacturing. With the increasingly fierce competition in the market, the market environment is constantly changing. Manufacturing enterprises must continuously redesign the facility layout so as to adapt the changing production demands and reduce the cost. This problem requires the solution of Dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP). In this paper, an improved hybrid ant colony optimization (HACO) is proposed to solve the DFLP with budget constraints. The HACO algorithm proposed by this paper can show good performance both for small and for large scale facility layout problems. There exists great gap between HACO and the other algorithms on solving large scale facility layout problems. Therefore, HACO is an effective method to solve dynamic facility layout problem with budget constraints.

Key words: dynamic facility layout problem, hybrid ant colony algorithm, budget constraint