Sensitivity Analysis for the Single Row Facility Layout Problem

Abstract

The single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is an important combinatorial optimization problem where a given set of facilities have to be arranged in a single row so as to minimize the weighted sum of the distances between all pairs of facilities. Sensitivity analysis for the SRFLP has not been reported in the literature till date. In this paper we present closed form expressions for tolerances of all SRFLP parameters. We also present heuristics to obtain upper bounds on the values of these tolerances. Our computational experiments show that the heuristics obtain exact values of tolerances for small sized instances. For larger sized instances, our heuristics obtain good quality bounds on the values of tolerances for a large fraction of the problem parameters. We also present a tightening procedure to improve on the upper bounds generated by our heuristics.