An industrial application of a generalized quadratic assignment model for facility layout

The purpose of this investigation is to determine the optimal assignment of a given set of departments to a given set of locations so that all necessary floor space constraints are satisfied and the total number of distance-loads for all departments is minimized. An exact model formulation is given and a number of related problems are discussed. A survey of available heuristic and exact algorithms is reviewed. The implementation of three quadratic assignment problem algorithms is discussed. Finally, the quadratic assignment algorithms are applied to the reassignment of departments at EG&G ORTEC, a manufacturing facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The results obtained show some improvement in the objective function, but some of the original hypotheses of the problem are not verified